Why Paul Rudd was cut from ‘Bridesmaids’: “That terrible moment when you have to kill your babies”
The ageless Paul Rudd has spent almost 30 years starring in hit comedies, but he was very close to adding another one to the collection before he ended up being left on the cutting room floor when Bridesmaids was being assembled in the editing suite.
From his feature film debut in 1995’s teen classic Clueless to his Golden Globe-nominated performance pulling double duty as copywriter Miles Elliot and his clone in Netflix’s Living with Yourself three decades later, Rudd has made a habit of lending his name to some of the 21st century’s most popular comedic productions on screens both big and small.
It’s an impressive laundry list that features David Wain’s cult favourite Wet Hot American Summer, the endlessly quotable Anchorman, Steve Carrell’s breakout star vehicle The 40 Year-Old Virgin, sitcom behemoth Friends, Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Role Models, I Love You, Man, and This Is the End.
Somehow, he’s also found the time to become a superhero as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Ant-Man, established himself as a fully-fledged Ghostbuster in the recent Afterlife sequel Frozen Empire, and was even named the sexiest man on the face of the planet. All that, and he still couldn’t make it into Bridesmaids.
Paul Feig’s raucous comedy recouped its budget almost ten times over at the box office, earned an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Original Screenplay’, and helped set Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Rebel Wilson, and more on the road to cinematic stardom. And yet, Rudd simply didn’t fit into the story the director wanted to tell.
He shot a cameo appearance as a date of Wiig’s Annie Walker, who soon reveals his nice guy act is all a façade when he unleashes a profanity-laden tirade at a child who accidentally cuts his finger with an ice skate during a trip to the rink. Feig admits that Rudd was on typically hilarious form, but he couldn’t justify squeezing it into Bridesmaids‘ running time, which stretched over two hours in its final form.
“There is always that terrible moment when you have to kill your babies,” he admitted to Sirius XM, with Rudd’s axed sequence “one of the funniest things I’ve ever been witness to.” Not that it guaranteed it a spot in the theatrical cut, though, with the filmmaker explaining that Jon Hamm had already fulfilled the quota for being one of Annie’s love interests who turns out to be a bit of a dick, with Chris O’Dowd rounding out the central love triangle.
“It just didn’t ring true that in addition to Jon and Chris, she’d be also going out on other dates to try and find more love,” he continued. “It made more sense that she’d be caught between these two guys. Very sadly, we cut all the blind date sequences out of the movie.” Unfortunately, despite throwing himself around on an ice rink all day, Rudd’s pratfalling turned out to be for nothing.
