There are several controversial actors in Hollywood, but Paul Rudd is not one of them. By all accounts, he is an exemplary human being, nice to people, and well-behaved. Judging by his looks and skin, he also appears to be either aging backwards or not aging at all, and the revelation about his actual age (52!) is always a source of amazement.
He is also a goofball, as evident by the way he managed to prank, again, popular talk show host Conan O’Brien under the guise of promoting his forthcoming narrative podcast for Audible.
While talking on Conan’s podcast called Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, the two, who are old friends, were talking about the Audible podcast for a few minutes before Rudd chimed in with an innocent-sounding, “We’ve recorded it. If you want to play a little bit of it,” and described the characters to bolster the fiction.
Conan answered with an emphatic “Sure!”, blissfully unaware he is going to be trick on his own show. When the “clip” began to play, it was not from Rudd’s podcast, or any podcast for that matter. It was a clip from the movie 1988 science fiction movie Mac And Me, which was derided for being a blatant ripoff of Steven Spielberg’s more venerable E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, released six years ago. The clip has been used to prank people for almost two decades.
As the clip began to play, Conan screamed with an air of somebody who did not expect this at all., “Oh for Christ’s sake! Why? Why! You can’t do that on a podcast! That’s why I didn’t see it coming. It’s a visual joke. This is an audio medium.”
He went on to ask Rudd. “Was there any truth you said in the setup?” Rudd replied cheerfully, “No. None of that was true.”
Rudd has previously pranked Conan similarly with the same clip multiple times in the past under the pretext of promoting his next project. And the tradition continues.
Paul Rudd will meanwhile next be seen in the MCU movie Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which releases on July 28, 2023.
