Paul Rudd- Just Your Average Superhero

The star of Marvel’s Ant-Man movies and Hollywood’s comedy go-to guy, Paul Rudd, has come a long way since Clueless. He tells Tracy Ramsden about falling in love, embarrassing his kids and being the seventh most popular character in Friends.

- Tracy Ramsden

Paul Rudd just took his car in for a tune-up, he’s about to go to the gym, and then he’ll catch up on some emails before doing the school run. ‘This is the exciting life of being a major motion-picture figure,’ he deadpans down the phone from his home in New York. The truth is, the 49-year-old once synonymous with the nice guy next door has a lot to be excited about. He’s a bona fide superhero these days. ‘It’s a cool club to belong to,’ says Rudd, sounding more like a competition winner than one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars. Joining the hallowed upper echelons of Marvel Studios in 2015, he landed the lead in Ant-Man, a role he’ll reprise this month in Ant-Man And The Wasp. ‘At the Marvel offices, I can go up to the third floor and get buzzed straight in. You feel as if you have the keys to the executive washroom.’ Of course, Rudd is no stranger to gaining access to exclusive clubs – he found himself unexpectedly on the periphery of ‘the big six’ when he joined the cast of Friends at the show’s peak in 2002 (the series finale in 2004 was watched by 52.5 million people in the US), as Phoebe’s boyfriend, Mike. ‘I went in with the awareness that one episode of that show was going to be seen by more people than everything that I’d ever done up until that point combined,’ he recalls. ‘I also knew that no one was going to be tuning in for “Mike Hannigan”,’ he laughs. ‘I didn’t want to get in the way. I was like, I’ll just stand in the back with Gunther.’