Paul Rudd, no stranger to ensemble comedies having starred in Wet Hot American Summer, Anchorman, and Knocked Up, transforms into a hippie-ish, free-spirited, optimist in Our Idiot Brother from director Jesse Peretz (The Ex). And although his character's referred to as an 'idiot' in the film's title, Ned is actually just a positive individual who's ready to give everyone he meets a chance and truly believes people are innately good.
Speaking with the press, Rudd talked about what drew him to the film and how he feels about his character, Ned.
On the appeal of Our Idiot Brother:
Paul Rudd: "I thought it was a nice story and I liked that it was funny and moving and straddled that world. I liked the idea of playing somebody that was certainly not judgmental and open and lived their life kind of in this way, which was a bit different than some of the other parts I played recently."
On reuniting with director Jesse Peretz and what they look for in a comedy:
Paul Rudd: "Character-based comedies, and that the humor derives from that. I love it when humor is used effectively to convey something dramatic and vice versa. We like a lot of the same stuff. We had a great time working on The Chateau, which is a movie we made about 11 years ago. We’re friends and we’ve remained good friends. Throughout the last decade we’ve collaborated on several films that we quit halfway through out of different circumstances, but the one thing that they all had in common was this thing that they weren’t necessarily conventional but we related to them in some way. There was something quirky about them, but they had their feet kind of planted in both of those worlds. And that’s nice when you get to work on something with somebody that feels similarly to you. You trust it more. It’s nice to do a scene and then think, 'All right, we both like a lot of the same stuff,' and I really trust Jesse. Jesse’s such a smart guy and a great director and is good with comedy, but is focused on the dramatic side of it as I am so that when he’s like, 'Yes, this’ll work,' it makes it easier to actually do the work because I’m not worried about, 'Oh gosh, is he going to like what I don’t like?'"
On Ned's eternal optimism:
Paul Rudd: "I don't know if it’s something he’s figured out. You know, I thought about it when I first read it and during the shooting of it. At a certain point, when everything’s happened to this guy, how would he change? Maybe he doesn’t change. If he’s really doing this, he really is living a life this way and it is conscious, it isn’t that of an innocent. I think that it is absolutely, he even says it, it was something that we talked about before we ever started shooting and were kind of working on the script a little bit, of actually saying living a life according to a very conscious ethic and that is to see, to throw your trust out there, really try and see the best in people. And if you do that, more often than not, they will rise to the occasion."
"I do think that people can do that and sometimes do that, and maybe in this guy’s life, despite the fact that it didn’t work out in the opening scene with the policemen and it didn’t work out in other aspects, it probably has in many others. He’s maybe figured out that that actually makes him happier. He is a lot less cluttered than the people around him. He isn’t going through some of the emotional turmoil that his sisters are going through, and that’s legitimate knowledge."
On doing a scene opposite a naked Steve Coogan:
Paul Rudd: "Yeah, that was just a happy accident I suppose. There was a hand sanitizer right next to the exit. That was one of the hardest, clearly, scenes to get through because I’m a big Steve Coogan fan and while I was friends with many of the people that worked on the film, I didn’t know Steve. I just really admired his work. I think we hit it off pretty quickly, I think. The surreal aspect of just meeting somebody whose work you really admire, then you see their penis and testicles...it’s just weird. But he’s a real, as is the case watching him whether it’s something as kind of subtle as Alan Partridge to something as extreme as Hamlet 2, he’s a real technician when it comes to finding this very specific humor in something. The way he would cover himself and then show something for a second because he’s agitated and then recover it again as if that was actually doing anything - very, very funny. He would make me laugh. He’s hard to work with because it’s hard to keep it together. Then the turn and just bumping into the chest of drawers on his dramatic exist. It’s all Coogan; it’s so funny."
On Ned's intelligence:
Paul Rudd: "I think the character is actually very smart. I think that one of the misnomers is that you see this title and you look at the way I look in the movie and think it’s some kind of stoner idiot that I’m playing. In actuality, I think he’s a very sharp guy and makes a conscious decision to live his life a certain way."
On Ned's spirituality:
Paul Rudd: "[He] lives his life in a way that I think he has very little baggage. He doesn’t go unaffected by the stresses and disappointments and it comes out in a little flash, but yeah, spiritual might be a way to describe it. It’s certainly an enlightened approach."
"He's not a guy who would make references of pop culture. It’s a different kind of guy."* * * * * * *
Our Idiot Brother also features Emily Mortimer, Elizabeth Banks, and Zooey Deschanel, and was released on August 26, 2011.
