Thursday, March 29, 2007
Paul Rudd
Attended KU: 1988-1990
Major: Theater
Hometown: Overland Park
Back in the day: Paul Rudd says he was just a regular college student at the University of Kansas. He went to basketball games, concerts, played drinking games, ate Yello Sub, watched bands perform at The Bottleneck and went to bars like The Wheel, The Bull and The Crossing. He studied theater, but only participated in one play at KU, an experimental version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which there were two Macbeths — good and evil — and he was the good one. Rudd says he grew a beard and long hair for the part, but the play was at best “weird.”
He didn’t grow up thinking he would be an actor; it was an idea given to him by his neighbor in high school when he showed an interest in improvisational comedy, radio, television and speech classes, Rudd says. He pursued acting open-mindedly until his junior year of college, when he decided that acting was what he wanted to do with his life. At that point, he left the University to go to acting school in Los Angeles.
Post-University life: Once Rudd figured out his career plan, he became “hyper-focused.” He even wished he’d studied a little more at the University so he wouldn’t have been overwhelmed in acting school, he says. His first big break was 1995’s Clueless, but some of his favorite movies to work on were Anchorman, The 40 Year Old Virgin and Wet Hot American Summer, he says. After the production of Clueless, Rudd moved to New York City where he lives today, 12 years later, with his wife, Julie Yaeger and his 2-year-old son.
Today: Rudd made a great group of friends at the University, some of whom he still talks to regularly, he says.Some of his favorite shows to watch are The Simpsons and the British version of The Office, which “may be the best show ever made,” says Rudd, whose parents are both from London. He’s also learning to play the guitar, which he says he’s “crappy” at, but he wishes he could record a song for the Kansan so that students could judge for themselves.
Rudd is enjoying his latest project, producing The Ten. It’s his first time producing and he says it’s very different from what he’s done before, but fun.
He says about show business: “It really is kind of creatively fulfilling. I really love what I do. I love the people I work with. I believe everybody needs to be creatively fulfilled somehow.”
Rudd also says he doesn’t agree with the movie stars who complain about how the business is “not glamourous.” He says it’s a lot of fun — even though he thinks it’d be way cooler to be a musician.
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