By the time Paul Rudd arrived at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts during the early ’90s, he’d ditched his mother’s gold lamé pants but still had a mop of hair plunging down his back, and his sartorial choices hardly screamed “everyman.”
His ambition: “Serious acting.” His air quotes, not mine.
Hanging on his wall as inspiration was a rhapsodic review of My Left Foot, which earned Daniel Day-Lewis his first Oscar for playing a guy with cerebral palsy. He was Rudd’s favorite actor — “Still is,” he says — and, having watched the film, he was convinced that that was “exactly the kind of actor” that he wanted to be.
Fendi sweater.
Photographed by Beau Grealy
