Paul Rudd: What's Not to Love?

Share this article

• Tweet

All About

Paul Rudd

Get the latest photos, news, and more

It also significantly raised his profile. As someone who's known Rudd for over a decade, I can attest that a stroll with him on the streets of New York City or at the Grove mall in L.A. today elicits countless more head turns from passersby than it did five years ago; once, when he handed a young cable-TV repairman who'd just fixed his DVR box a signed 40 Year-Old Virgin DVD, the man acted like he'd just won the lottery. ''I've always felt like I'm the kind of actor that some people might recognize but they probably don't know my name,'' he says, although the cable guy would probably disagree. ''I'm not a star,'' Rudd adds. ''I don't have a big drive to be 'the guy.'''

Rudd's career philosophy may help explain why he's not entirely comfortable with his rising Q score, particularly when photographers follow him while he's out with his wife, Julie, and their 4-year-old son, Jack. ''I feel like I've spent a good part of my career avoiding a lot of that. I'm glad that I'm not in Los Angeles to see the billboards for I Love You, Man, especially because it seems like the Role Models ones just came down. And now, having a little kid, I'm really starting to analyze this stuff more and more and how it's going to affect him. I have had little tiny panic attacks along the road here, for this publicity tour for the movie. It's really stress-inducing. I've been working a long time, and things are going well in my career right now, and I appreciate it. I'm just trying to navigate my way through all of it. I'll be happy to go away for a while, in all honesty.''

He won't be getting a break anytime soon, with a schedule that's already booked up for the rest of 2009. He'll film an untitled James L. Brooks love-triangle film with Reese Witherspoon and Owen Wilson this spring, before reuniting in the fall with his Virgin costar Steve Carell for Dinner for Schmucks, a remake of the 1998 French smash Le Dîner de Cons, about a disastrous dinner party. (He also lends his voice to this month's animated adventure Monsters vs. Aliens, and will show up in a cameo in this summer's Jack Black comedy Year One.) Still, he'd be perfectly content to stay home and jam on acoustic guitar with Jack, who's a prodigy on the drums — though he's not necessarily too impressed with Dad's burgeoning career. ''He knows that I make movies — he comes to the set,'' Rudd says. ''But he also knows Steve Carell and Seth Rogen and Will Ferrell. So I think he just thinks that everyone's on TV. Like it's not a special thing.''

Perhaps the surest sign of his new level of celebrity? Embarrassing stories from his past are now making national headlines. Fox TV sportscaster Joe Buck just told Time that Rudd ''always liked to get naked'' in his University of Kansas frat house, while in last week's Time Out New York magazine, Segel recalled waking up from a nap on the I Love You, Man set and being greeted by, let's just say, a certain part of Rudd's anatomy. ''The truth is, I probably can't contest either one,'' he says with a chuckle. ''I'm not Harvey Keitel or anything, but over the course of the last 20 years, there is a chance that maybe once or twice I have gotten naked for a cheap laugh.'' And that is why we love you, man.