PAUL RUDD
Midsummer in Oxford ’93
“After Clueless, he moved to New York to act in a play, and after his first job on a TV show, he went to study Jacobean drama at Oxford’s British American Drama Academy. Listening to him describe this period, I wonder if being 22 in Oxford might have been the happiest time in his life.
‘I loved it. I loved working on Shakespeare. I loved living in the dorms at Oxford. I loved walking the campus. I loved getting tea. I loved memorising the lines. I loved working on the plays. My hair was down to the middle of my back. I was enthusiastic and optimistic and taking everything in. It was joyous.’
It was also grounding, he says: ‘It made me feel as though my place in all of it was the right place, which was infinitesimal. I was a small cog in a wheel that’s been spinning for a long time.’ ”
Paul Rudd interviewed by Ralph Jones for ShortList, 1 August 2018
Film: Ant-Man; Ant-Man and The Wasp; I Love You, Man; Knocked Up; Forgetting Sarah Marshall; The Forty Year Old Virgin; Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy; The Shape of Things; The Cider House Rules; Clueless. Broadway: Twelfth Night, Three Days of Rain, The Last Night of Ballyhoo