Paul Rudd

Paul Rudd trained at the University of Kansas and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and made his acting debut in 1991, a slightly formal start for a man who has spent most of his career improvising. Clueless in 1995 is where the screen persona appears fully formed: Josh, the stepbrother who is the only person in the film with a functioning conscience and who never gets a scene about it.

The trick he has run ever since is pleasantness with a crack running through it. Rudd plays men whose niceness is a strategy, and the comedy comes from watching the strategy strain. Brian Fantana in Anchorman has total unearned confidence. Pete in Knocked Up and This Is 40 is a man being reasonable at his wife while obviously in the wrong. I Love You, Man is built entirely on the awkwardness of somebody who has never previously had to be sincere.

Then Marvel made him a franchise lead in his mid-forties, which is not supposed to happen, and Ant-Man works precisely because it is the least self-serious corner of that universe and he is exactly the right size for it. The more interesting recent move is his willingness to be unlikeable: a repellent mercenary in Mute, a vain actor in Only Murders in the Building. He has a Critics' Choice Television Award and nominations at the Emmys, the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild, and was named People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive in 2021, an honour that landed on a career built almost entirely out of self-deprecation.