Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is a couple weeks away, so the press tour is in high gear now. Accordingly, Paul Rudd is on the cover of Men’s Health. First and most importantly: does he drop the skincare routine? NO. But his ageless looks do come up. I make a lot of jokes about how Paul Rudd doesn’t age, but let’s be honest for a second, the man is 53 and doesn’t actually look like he did in Clueless. He HAS aged. There are lines, they’re visible. We see them, we just like our jokes more than acknowledging them. But he does look AMAZING. Drop the skincare routine! What laser facial are you getting, Paul Rudd?!
This interview, conducted by Ross McCammon, is basically broken into two parts. One is dedicated to how “inspiring” Rudd is because he’s an everyman who made it, because global fame hasn’t ruined him, because even 30-plus years into a mega-successful career, Rudd can still sit down in public and be relatively normal. These are certainly not givens for actors even half his age and stature, like, Paul Rudd would never do the Elvis voice, you know? Bless Austin Butler and let him talk however he wants, he’s adorable, but that’s not Paul Rudd. He’s the normal one. In a world of Jared Letos, Paul Rudd is proudly Not Method. He’s drama free. He’s one of the last unproblematic white men in Hollywood, and it is not a coincidence that his popularity exploded just as so many of his peers went down as assholes and predators. I don’t know if I’d call that “inspiring”, but there is something to be said for just being normal in a career that encourages not-normal behavior.
The other half of the interview is time-defying propaganda. Rudd attributes his skin and post-fifty superhero body to sleep, saying, “If you can somehow get eight hours of sleep…” Jennifer Lopez also attributes “seven to nine hours” of sleep a night to her gravity-defying skin. Sleep is definitely important, I’m not going to argue that. But most people can’t get that much sleep, either because of the demands of life, a particular job schedule, or just being a bad sleeper (like me). One of the privileges of wealth we don’t talk about enough is sleep privilege. How good would we all look if we could clock a solid eight hours of sleep every night? Maybe sleep IS the secret and we’ll never know because we don’t have assistants and nannies and jobs where we get months off at a time to rest.
But Rudd also talks about regular cardio and weekly weight training, and drinking protein shakes that are “just protein and water, no fruit”. So drinking…unhappiness? I start most days with a protein shake but that sucker is loaded with fruits and berries—to hide the taste of greens—but even I, a protein shake convert, cannot fathom drinking just protein and water. Is that what despair tastes like? Rudd insists this routine is “comforting”, but maybe he’s just forgotten what joy is. I’ll think I’ll trade a few hours of sleep every night to keep the fruit in my smoothies.
I love Paul Rudd and I’m not here to pick on him, but one thing that drives me nuts about these kinds of interviews is how they talk around whatever intensive skincare Rudd is engaged in. Maybe some of it is genetics, and maybe some of it is plenty of sleep and joyless smoothies, but like…come on. We’re not blind and we’re not dumb. Anyone who has fallen down the skincare rabbit hole knows Rudd, and every other “ageless” celebrity, is doing more than just sleeping and eating right. I just wish there was a little bit more honesty around this topic, that it was less taboo for people to discuss procedures, invasive or not.
We talk about it all the time amongst ourselves, but celebrities still won’t admit what they’re up to regarding facials and lasers and lifts and peels and whatnot. It’s always the same answer with them—sleep a lot, eat right, absorb the moon’s glow at the solstice peak, et cetera. That even “everyman” Paul Rudd, the normal one, preserves the cult of secrecy around celebrity skincare is a sign of where and how things haven’t changed. They’ll sell us their expensive branded skincare lines, but they won’t tell us which doctors they’re seeing for which procedures. To Rudd’s credit, he’s never tried to sell us anything but chips, insurance, and Super Nintendo, and he’s never claimed to be a skincare maven—like JLo—but at his age, with that skin, and being a famously “ageless” person, it’s going to keep coming up. And I guess we’ll keep pretending like it’s a baffling mystery of the universe until we have all returned to the dirt.
