How do you explain your job to your young child if said job involves starring in blockbuster films for the whole world to see? Well, if you’re Paul Rudd, you just let them believe you work at a movie theater instead. In a recent interview, the actor recalled the story of how his son Jack just assumed his dad was a regular theater employee, and Rudd simply never bothered to correct him.
“[This was] when my kids were very young,” Rudd explained while taping an episode of Sunday Today with Willie Geist. “I’m not gonna sit my kids down when they’re three and say, ‘Hold on…I got some DVDs to show you.’ So I really didn’t even explain what I did.”
So Jack was left to his own devices to figure out what, exactly, Dad did all day. “I think that my son, when he was about four or five, went to a movie theater to see a movie with his friends,” Rudd explained. “There was a movie poster that I was on. It was in the lobby. So they all just thought that I worked at the movie theater, which I thought was very cute.”
Rudd kept the bit up for an impressively long time: “I never corrected him!” The actor didn’t say exactly which film of his made everything click for Jack, but it wasn’t until the younger Rudd was about 15 — so, only a couple of years ago — that he realized his own father was the SNL Five-Timer, People’s Sexiest Man Alive, Marvel hero Ant-Man, and national treasure Paul Rudd.
Jack’s dad has most recently appeared on movie theater posters for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which is out February 17th. He’s also about to wrap Season 3 of Only Murders in the Building, in which he joins the recurring cast.
