Focus Features

In Paul Weitz’s comedy ADMISSION, Tina Fey plays Portia Nathan, a Princeton admissions officer whose life gets turned inside out when she meets John Pressman, the head of an alternative high school called New Quest. While the story mostly follows Nathan’s journey, the character of Pressman was instrumental to the narrative, if not a difficult part to cast. The actor had to match Fey comically while still keeping the story believable and sincere. For producer Andrew Miano, “Paul Rudd was the ideal actor because he is so versatile; he goes from indie films to laugh-out-loud popular comedies to edgy stage work.” Fey and Rudd clicked comically. As Rudd recounts, “Tina and I had done some sketch comedy on Saturday Night Live,” but even more importantly both actors came at comedy in a similar way. “Tina is going to be funny,” Rudd explains, “but she deflects all of her jokes. She’s not schtick-y; that’s not her style. Instead, she plays into what’s funny in the situation and the character, making sure that the humor emerges naturally.” In many ways, Rudd’s description of Fey perfectly mirrors his own approach. By sharing a very natural sense of humor, both actors were able to tell a story that is at once funny and filled with emotional depth. Indeed for the filmmakers the actors needed not only to tell the immediate story, but to suggest a rich and complex backstory that had landed them both where they were in their lives. Producer Kerry Kohansky-Roberts explains, “We knew that Paul Rudd partnering on-screen with Tina Fey could make these emotional sea changes persuasive.”  Indeed over the last 20 years Rudd has created a persona who, while indeed funny, is also a figure audiences believe to be their friend, long after they have left the theater.

Born in Passaic, NJ, Rudd moved at age 10 to Overland, Kansas, with his family. As Rudd later commented to GQ, while his family (English, Jewish, liberal) didn\'t exactly “fit the stereotypical Kansan, Midwestern persona—kind of the Bible Belt, happy, Christian, really white-bread…there is something I really, really loved about growing up there.” And Rudd later told Elle that “at my core, I\'m a Midwesterner… I think that my day is better, I\'m happier, when people are pleasant to each other. I think it\'s so much nicer." Although Rudd would later bring many off-kilter characters believably to life, he never lost his childhood belief in being nice. Despite all its niceness, Kansas did not make acting an obvious career choice, even if Rudd instinctively knew he loved comedy. He told Cinema Diving, “I first started to realize that you could have a career talking, which is all I viewed it as, when I got into the Steve Martin comedy records.” He followed his dream of carving out a career “talking” by majoring in drama at the University of Kansas, before moving to Pasadena\'s American Academy of Dramatic Arts. After graduating in 1991, Rudd started to make a name for himself doing TV shows (like Sisters and the short-lived comedy Wild Oats), as well as some theater, like an L.A. production of Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry. Still wanting to refine his thespian skills, Rudd jumped at the opportunity to study for a semester at Oxford University’s British Drama Academy. Returning to the United States, Rudd hoped to make his name with what he was told would be a smart-house horror reboot, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Unfortunately much of the slashing was done by the critics after the film hit theaters. Luckily another film, a Beverly Hills retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma, called Clueless, provided a happier launching pad for his career. As the Nietzsche-reading serious stepbrother who eventually wins over Alicia Silverstone, Rudd broke out as a leading man who could be both nice and adorable.

As soon as Paul Rudd’s nice guy appeal was roundly applauded, he turned around and subverted it, often with the help of writer/director David Wain. In Wain’s Wet Hot American Summer, Rudd rejected suggestions for him to play the nice guy, opting instead to embody the obnoxious spirit of Andy, the camp counselor who does whatever he wants, including making off with the woman whom the film’s fumbling hero, Coop (played by co-writer Michael Showalter), covets. For Rudd, the summer camp spoof perfectly captured his own off-kilter sense of humor. As he recollects about first reading the screenplay, “I just thought, ‘This is so absurd…Oh my god, I’d love to work on something that really feels like it’s my scene’.” His portrayal of the self-centered Andy proved to be a comic masterwork. New York Times’ A. O. Scott commented, “Mr. Rudd not only steals Coop\'s girl, but suavely walks off with Mr. Showalter\'s movie as well.” In David Wain’s 2007 Old Testament sketch anthology The Ten, Rudd plays the affable – bordering on smarmy – host who introduces each of the film’s blackly comic takes on the ten commandments (as well as starring as a commandment breaker himself in one of them). And in Wain’s Role Models, Rudd ratchets up his smart-ass persona to play an energy drink rep whose bad behavior forces him (and coworker Seann William Scott) to play big brothers. While Rudd, who mentors ultra-nerd Christopher Mintz-Plasse, ultimately learns to be a human being by the film’s end, the fun is watching him get there. As Empire magazine writes, “Rudd (why is he not a bigger star?) injects maximum venom into a wide variety of put-downs.”

While Paul Rudd has worked repeatedly and successfully with certain directors –– David Wain, Neil LaBute and Amy Heckerling, to name a few –– by far his most consistent and comically important collaborator is producer/writer/director Judd Apatow. Rudd first joined the Apatow posse in Adam McKay’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, in which he played the foolishly flashy field reporter Brian Fantana in a newsroom of comic greats, including Will Ferrell and Steve Carell. In the next 10 years, Rudd would work with Apatow on more than eight films, including such comedy classics as Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Wanderlust (which David Wain directed and Apatow produced). But Rudd is perhaps best known for three films that Apatow wrote, directed and produced. In Apatow’s 2005 hit The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Rudd was part of the gang of coworkers, which includes Romany Malco and Seth Rogen, all conspiring to help Steve Carell get some “experience.” Then in Apatow’s 2007 Knocked Up, Rudd – whom Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum labeled the “handsome MVP of thinking-man\'s comedies” – played Pete, the disgruntled husband (married to Apatow’s real-life wife, Leslie Mann), who lets the film’s hero, Seth Rogen, know about the mire of married life that awaits him if he chooses to settle down. In This is 40, the 2012 sequel to Knocked Up, Pete (Rudd) and his wife Debbie (Mann) are moved to center stage as Apatow creates in Rudd his own alter ego. Not only is he married to Apatow’s wife in the film, but their children are actually Apatow’s kids as well. In Rudd, Apatow has in many ways the perfect everyman – a comic figure with whom nearly everyone identifies. Indeed as Variety’s Justin Chang points out, “Rudd layers his good-guy demeanor with a sardonic edge that can ignite, when provoked, into full-blown rage.” He’s a real person with real and messy emotions, but still one that you ultimately want to befriend.