“I couldn’t be more miscast”: the bizarre moment Paul Rudd played the villain in a Hong Kong action movie
Hollywood’s resident ageless wonder, Paul Rudd, feels like he’s been around forever. It’s only been 30 years, give or take, which is still a pretty long time, but he had to wait a while to make it to the top.
While he was a frequent presence onscreen from the early 1990s, it wasn’t until after the turn of the millennium that he became a star, thanks largely to his status as a member of Judd Apatow’s ‘Frat Pack’ repertory, and the early years of his career make for dizzying, and often ludicrous, reading.
Starting off with a bang, Rudd’s big-screen debut came in the enduring cult favourite comedy, Clueless, and he quickly racked up further roles in the fifth instalment in the Halloween franchise, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, and Lasse Hallström’s two-time Academy Award-winning drama, The Cider House Rules.
Before all of that, he starred in a Christian short film that he begged to have his name taken off, and immediately after sharing a star-studded ensemble with an Oscar-winning Michael Caine, Tobey Maguire, Charlize Theron, Delroy Lindo, and Kieran Culkin, he played the villain in a Hong Kong action flick.
It sounds like a Saturday Night Live sketch, but Rudd really did travel to the other side of the world to shoot a movie where he antagonised the titular local law enforcement officers as a bleach-blonde federal agent responsible for unleashing a deadly robot onto the streets of Hong Kong.
To make things even more bizarre, when Gen-Y Cops, the sequel to Gen-X Cops, naturally, premiered on American television, it was rebranded as Jackie Chan Presents: Metal Mayhem, which made even less sense since the martial arts and action genre icon had absolutely nothing to do with the film in any capacity.
“How I got this job, I have no idea,” Rudd confessed. “Because I literally couldn’t be more miscast.” He’s not wrong, since even after everything he’s achieved during his three decades in the spotlight, you still can’t picture him breaking bad as the resident foreign adversary in a flick helmed by the prolific Hong Kong journeyman, Benny Chan.
When asked if Gen-Y Cops was successful, he was nothing if not honest. “I have no idea,” he responded, even though it was, if only moderately. “I’ve actually never seen it. They bleached my hair blonde. My wife said that if Duran Duran made a video about the FBI, I looked like Simon Le Bon.”
It may not have been his finest hour or his fondest recollection, but Rudd was nonetheless game for the opportunity, with one scene requiring him to have his legs coated in flame-retardant gel to jump out of an exploding car. It wasn’t high art, but at least it was more involved than standing in front of a green screen for weeks on end as Marvel’s Ant-Man.
