Why Paul Rudd spent the early part of his career terrified of Ben Kingsley: “I lived in fear”
Everybody lies on their CV, it’s part of life, but it’s a minor kind that you can usually get away with, like saying you’re on your way for drinks when you haven’t left yet, or that you think Robbie Williams is talented. The problem comes, of course, when it catches up with you further down the line, as Paul Rudd knows all too well.
What made it worse for Rudd was that his slight fudging of his curriculum vitae came with the added spectre of an upset Sir Ben Kingsley, which, as anyone who has ever seen him reducing Ray Winstone to a quivering sun-tanned mess in Sexy Beast will know, is not a fun prospect whatsoever.
The embellishment occurred early in Rudd’s career, long before he could lean on the fact he’d done Marvel movies or big hit comedies like Friends. He was a student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York in the late 1980s when he had the opportunity to attend an afternoon masterclass being given by Kingsley, who at that point was a Golden Globe and Oscar-winning ‘Best Actor’ thanks to his work on 1982’s epic, Gandhi.
As Rudd would later tell Graham Norton, that got slightly ‘sexed up’ when it came to putting his résumé together, because he had no acting credits to fall back on whatsoever.
He recalled, “My manager put this down as, ‘Paul played Hamlet in a production directed by Sir Ben Kingsley’. I lived in fear that he would one day see my CV!”
Fortunately for Rudd, that wasn’t something that ever ended up happening, unless Kingsley at some point asked for it specifically to be emailed over to him when the pair of them ended up as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; Rudd in Ant-Man and Kingsley as Trevor Slattery, who has so far popped up in Iron Man 3, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and this year’s Disney Plus TV series Wonder Man, which has been renewed for a second season.
And Rudd’s CV didn’t stay without any credits for too long at all, as he had to wait less than five years between leaving acting school and landing a first major role in a Hollywood movie with 1995’s Clueless, playing the love interest of Alicia Silverstone’s wealthy high school student Cher Horowitz.
It was also his first global hit, the comedy earning $88million at the box office against a budget of just $12m, and kicking off a prolific career that went into overdrive once he was cast as Phoebe Buffay’s boyfriend in Friends in 2002. That saw him become one of the leading comic actors in the US with a string of successes like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, This is 40 and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but this year is all about Marvel once more for Rudd.
With Avengers: Doomsday arriving in cinemas in less than six months’ time, the mega-movie that will unite pretty much every superhero franchise in existence, including Rudd’s Ant-Man, 11 years after he first donned the tiny supersuit in the 2015 original opposite Michael Douglas, with two further films following in 2018 and 2023, Ant-Man and the Wasp, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
