“Career suicide seemed more interesting”: the roles Paul Rudd didn’t want to play
When Paul Rudd was in his mid-20s, he scored his first film role as the slightly pretentious older ex-step-brother of Alicia Silverstone’s Cher in the Amy Heckerling teen movie Clueless.
Listening to Radiohead, or as Cher puts it, “the maudlin music of the university station” and reading Friedrich Nietzsche (what else would a self-righteous college boy be reading?), Josh is not as adult as he likes to think. Eventually, he falls for Cher – even if their parents used to be together, which is a bit weird – and he gives into his softer side.
Rudd charmed many audiences with his performance as Josh, getting increasingly more likeable as the film progressed, and all these years later, many of us still see him as Silverstone’s love interest before anything else – not Ant Man or even Andy from Wet Hot American Summer.
Yet, when Rudd had just finished Clueless, he started to worry that he was going to get pigeonholed into romantic comedy roles. He didn’t want to become a rom-com star, and perhaps the elitism of his character in Heckerling’s film was present in the actor’s approach to picking roles, because he admits to believing that he thought he was essentially above being a romantic leading man.
It’s not hard to see why an actor emerging during the 1990s rom-com boom – but with tastes that didn’t exactly align – would want to avoid getting pigeonholed into the genre, but Rudd went as far as to claim that back then, he thought it would basically be “career suicide.”
Talking to AV Club, the actor revealed how he tried to avoid landing more roles like Clueless, which evidently worked in his favour, because Rudd’s forays into comedy have only rarely touched on the rom-com genre since then. “Um, career suicide seemed more interesting than that. I moved out of California. I was in my early 20s – it’s the time in your life when you can afford to do what you wanna do,” he explained.
“And I was such a snob and an elitist when it came to my taste in music and my taste in movies and everything else, I was like, ‘Fuck that. I wanna do cool shit.’ I would like to say that I actually said it more eloquently, but I don’t think I did.” Perhaps Rudd had some internalised misogyny going on, but as a guy in his 20s, he wasn’t exactly going to view the height of cinematic cool as a chick flick, let’s be real.
“So after being Josh in Clueless, I did a play for a year, and was not interested in doing another version of Josh. Looking back, I’m really happy with the choices I’ve made in my career. I know for a fact I could be wealthier. Who knows, maybe I could be more successful, maybe not. I don’t know. But just about every single thing I’ve ever done, I’ve gone into with the right intentions, and that goes a long way. It may not pay my rent, but it’s kind of enriching in other, possibly more important ways,” Rudd surmised.
The actor successfully avoided being typecast then, and eventually went on to land the biggest role of his career with his performance as Ant-Man. Yet, in the years since Clueless, he hasn’t totally abandoned the rom-com, appearing in movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
Clearly, he’s come to terms with the genre now, because there’s nothing wrong with a good rom-com.
