One of the first things people tend to notice about Paul Rudd is that age shall not weary him. To mark a recent birthday on Instagram, his fellow superhero Chris Evans had a question: “Why don’t you age? Are you drinking baby blood?”A fan of sunscreen, clean eating and a good night’s sleep, Rudd was already in his 50s when People Magazine named him the sexiest man alive. Now 57, and a little jet-lagged from a transatlantic flight for the Dublin premiere of Power Ballad, John Carney’s new rock musical, the current Rudd looks eerily like the Rudd who came to international prominence opposite Alicia Silverstone in Clueless, 31 years ago.“At this point I’m a little old for Hamlet,” he says. “I might have to go for Polonius.”You wouldn’t know it.Following in the footsteps of Keira Knightley, Mark Ruffalo and Eve Hewson, Rudd is the latest Hollywood star to feature in a Carney movie. Since 2007 the Dublin film-maker has crafted a series of musicals in which the songs are part of the narrative rather than high-kicking extravaganzas. Rudd is a fan of Carney’s back catalogue, which includes Begin Again, Sing Street, Flora and Son and, of course, the Oscar-winning Once.“Singing is not what I do,” Rudd says. “When Power Ballad came about, I was elated. I’d loved John’s other films. It was absolutely nerve-racking and intimidating, especially during the weeks before we started filming, when I really started thinking, What was I thinking? Why did I do this? But to kind of show off and do something that I felt scared to do was really fun and challenging.”Rudd plays Rick Power, an American wedding singer, long settled in Ireland, who was formerly the frontman of an also-ran rock band called Octagon. As the film opens, Rick has spent 15 years performing cover versions with his group, Bride and Groove, while privately nursing a sense of thwarted ambition.It’s not all bad: he is happily married to Rachel (played by Marcella Plunkett), with a 14-year-old daughter, Aja (the newcomer Beth Fallon).One fateful evening at a castle wedding, Rick performs alongside Nick Jonas’s Danny Wilson, a former boy-band star whose solo career has failed to launch. The two musicians meet and, during an impromptu late-night session, exchange and refine each other’s unfinished ideas, discovering a creative chemistry and producing a song that becomes a major hit for Danny. When Rick eventually hears the track in public he recognises it as his own composition, but he can’t produce proof of authorship, sending him on a crazed journey to Los Angeles to confront the song thief in person.“It was really tapping into the same person that I thought I was when I was six and seven years old in my bedroom, pretending, and singing into a hairbrush or playing guitar on a tennis racket,” Rudd says. “I think a lot of kids do that. You’re so connected to the thing that’s going on in your imagination. And it’s fun to get to play rock star for a little while.”Rudd, who has spent more than a decade moonlighting as Ant-Man, is well accustomed to the security protocols of the Marvelverse, wherein actors seldom receive complete scripts and entire postal districts of San Francisco are locked down for secret shoots. Wandering around Dundrum Town Centre, in south Dublin, alongside shoppers with Penneys bags was a brave new world.“I’m such a fan of this city and this country,” he says. “The people here are so hilarious and down to earth. We shot in the mall when it was open. People around didn’t mind. We wound up talking to people, meeting people. There was something specifically Irish about that experience. It was kind of a hoot.”Rudd was born in 1969 in Passaic, New Jersey, to London-born parents of Jewish heritage. When he was 10 the family relocated to Kansas, where his father was based as an airline executive, and his mother worked at a local television station. He remains a supporter of the local NFL team, the Kansas City Chiefs, but, like so many American kids, he’s from more than one place. His dad’s job also took the family to California for three years. He had his bar mitzvah with relations in Canada.Power Ballad: Nick Jonas and Paul Rudd in John Carney's film. Photograph: David Cleary/Lionsgate “Growing up with European parents, different states, different schools, different religion – all of those things make you feel a little bit on the outside,” Rudd says. “And if you’re hopping around, in a new place every few years, it’s, like, ‘Okay, I’ve got to do all of this again.’ There’s always a little bit of bobbing and weaving.”He does a quick calculation.“When you’re always in a new school you have to somehow acclimatise. You have to try and figure out how to befriend somebody. I think I learned pretty early on that if I could make somebody laugh, maybe they won’t beat me up.”Rudd traces his sense of humour back to his English roots. There is much theatrical colour there. His grandfather, who shortened the family surname to Rudd from the Ashkenazi Rudnitsky, toured London billed as the “world’s strongest man”. The connection with England remained. Growing up, Rudd read The Beano and The Dandy, watched Monty Python, and made frequent trips to the old country.“It was a huge part of my life,” he says. “Especially because my father worked in the aviation industry. We were able to fly to London to see relatives very often. It felt very familiar. And the chocolate was good.”Rudd decided he wanted to act after watching Martin Scorsese’s nervy thriller After Hours, from 1985. There was no plan B. He attended the University of Kansas, where he majored in theatre. He later transferred to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he trained alongside Matthew Lillard, and then to study Jacobean drama at an academy in Oxford.Clueless: Paul Rudd and Alicia Silverstone in the 1995 film. Photograph: Paramount Pictures He can still remember the first table read of Clueless, a bona-fide teen classic.“Honestly, I’ve gone into every job with real hope and positivity and excitement, thinking it could be something really great,” he says. “A lot of times it isn’t. Some things just go away, and then every once in a while somebody will say something about it, and you think, Wow, you saw that? It’s always surprising when that happens, and it’s usually something obscure. “Then other things take on a life of their own that I never would have predicted, like that meme from Hot Ones. Clueless never went away.”Few would have predicted that the meme from Hot Ones would end up as a defining moment in Rudd’s career. His appearance in 2019 on the hit YouTube series, in which stars share increasingly spicy chicken wings with its host, Sean Evans, was notable for an exchange addressing the unlikely sublimity of their current state. “Look at us. Hey, look at us,” Rudd says, smiling, to Evans.“Look at us. Who would have thought?” the host quips back.“Not me!” Rudd replies, in a state of chillified euphoria.The subsequent ubiquity of the clip stems partly from the unforced amiability that has become one of Rudd’s great selling points: the ordinary bloke, everyone’s buddy. “When people perceive Paul Rudd they always think he’s an amazing person – and he genuinely is,” Beth Fallon, his costar in Power Ballad, told The Irish Times earlier this year. If only he earned royalties from the “Look at us” gif.All that was a long time away in the years after Clueless. Rudd then focused on Broadway, appearing in Alfred Uhry’s The Last Night of Ballyhoo and Nicholas Hytner’s production of Twelfth Night. Between jobs on the boards, he featured alongside Donald Pleasence in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers and Michael Caine in The Cider House Rules. He had a supporting part in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, and a leading role opposite Jennifer Aniston in The Object of My Affection. “I always hoped I could make films but also live in New York and do a play a year,” he says. “My goal was to be able to do both. That hasn’t changed, by the way. I wanted to be a working actor. But I didn’t foresee the career I ended up with. I didn’t think I’d end up doing so much comedy.”Sure enough, in 2002 he joined the cast of the NBC series Friends in a recurring role as Phoebe’s love interest, a part he has likened to being a prop. Over the next decade he became a regular presence in studio comedies, including Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, This Is 40 and I Love You, Man.Rudd is a natural, whether unveiling his condom collection or boasting about aphrodisiac properties in the Anchorman series – “60 per cent of the time it works every time” – or producing such cringe classics as his Robert De Niro impersonation in The 40-Year-Old Virgin or the excruciating mirror pep talk in the 2012 film Wanderlust (“Do you like my exquisite erection? Do you like my erection selection?”).Paul Rudd and Steve Carell in Anchorman. Photograph: Paramount/Dreamworks His unexpected comic chops have allowed him to branch into writing, contributing to the screenplays for the 2018 comedy Role Models and the two Ant-Man films.The Marvelverse has further boosted Rudd’s status in Hollywood, but he remains a much-lauded and very self-deprecating “nice guy”. Since 2003 he has been married to the producer and writer Julie Yaeger. The couple have two children: a son, Jack Sullivan, who was born in 2006, and daughter, Darby, born in 2010. A great pal of Aniston and their fellow actors Jon Hamm and Adam Scott, Rudd, even deep in jet lag, does a fine impersonation of a good egg.[ Severance actor Adam Scott on filming in west Cork: ‘I was the American weirdo upstairs. I loved it’Opens in new window ]“I’m not one of those actors who disappear into a role,” he says. “I can goof around on set. I can jump. I can keep one foot on the bridge of the world and pretend while we’re rolling. “I did a very small movie called Our Idiot Brother. I play a really optimistic guy. He’s constantly making mistakes. But he sees the good in everyone. “I found myself feeling really happy making that movie. I didn’t know why. Then I realised the role was bleeding into everything. That’s a good place to be.”The crossover between the fictional Rudd and the real Rudd is not all in your head.“Sometimes I also dress like my characters in real life,” he says. “But that’s because I take all the clothes from the set.”Power Ballad is in cinemas from Friday, May 29th