What I Learned From Paul Rudd (& Other Cool People)
Tuesday, May 5, 2015 at 8:40AM 
At the premiere of Avengers: Age of UltronThe Film Experience welcomes rising actor David Dastmalchian (Ant-Man, Animals, Prisoners) who has taken over the blog for a day! -Editor
-by David Dastmalchian
The following are some rad people that I had the chance to work with or work near or at least stand across the street from – and the cool stuff that I learned while watching them. I’ve kind of fashioned my entire life that way: honing in on the people who are really good at what they do and, well, trying to copy-cat them.
PAUL RUDD.
LESSON: ‘Keep the scene rolling until they yell ‘cut’. And be nice to everyone. And always carry cash’.
It’s very intimidating to work on scenes with an actor who can continue to improvise past the text until every single person within a hundred feet is laughing out loud. I had the opportunity to work with Paul on his upcoming Ant-Man for Marvel Studios directed by Peyton Reed. Paul had an extreme amount of physical work to do with his preparation, as well as re-writing the project and he was incredibly focused. He came to work each day prepared to make the most out of the scripted text – while being simultaneously open to improvisation as soon as the director gave him the green light. It was amazing. He is an endless well of ideas and he’s also very generous, so he would turn to me sometimes when he was on a riff and toss me a golden line. I dropped as few as possible.
More Paul and other cool people after the jump...
