Rudd: Devoted Chiefs fan, now ghostbuster
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — It’s been a busy month for Paul Rudd, who in his new movie “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” helps save the world from a giant horned specter that gives scary new meaning to “freezing someone out.”
The movie, his second “Ghostbusters” adventure, opens Friday, and he spent days fulfilling his Hollywood obligation of talking about it to the media.
He joked around with late-night hosts Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers.
He and the cast got up early to talk to the folks at “CBS Mornings,” where Rudd shared couch space with three of the original ghostbusters who appear in the film — Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson.
He did back-to-back-to-back-toback-to-back phone interviews with reporters across the country, which we know he just loves. Kidding.
“After a while you get used to answering the same question, so you just think of a different way to say the same answer,” he once said with an “ugh” of movie junkets and talk-show appearances.
We can only guess how many ways this month he answered these:
What’s it like working with the OG ghostbusters?
Are those proton packs heavy? What was it like driving the famous “Ghostbusters” car, Ecto1?
When The Star got Rudd on the phone for our handful of designated minutes, we decided it would be journalistic malpractice not to ask the man who partied with the Kansas City Chiefs in the locker room after the Super Bowl last month about this past championship season, when Taylor Swift became the team’s most famous fan.
(Sorry, Paul.)
Colbert kinda wondered, too: Are Swifties really welcome in Chiefs Kingdom?
She is not, after all, a lifelong fan like Rudd and scads of others who treat season tickets like gold and tailgate in heat and snow. Rudd was born in New Jersey but grew up in Overland Park, Kansas, where he graduated from Shawnee Mission West before attending the University of Kansas.
Rudd told The Star he likes the energy Swifties bring and is awed by the worldwide attention Swift’s romance with tight end Travis Kelce has earned the team.
“It’s obviously made everything (about the team) a lot more visible,” he said. “I’m happy for the two of them because they are both great people.”
Is there anyone by now who doesn’t know Rudd as a superfan of his hometown sports teams? (Remember how he invited Kansas City Royals fans to a “kegger at my mom’s house” after the team got into the World Series in 2014? Some of them actually showed up. Sorry, Mrs. Rudd.)
When he visited Colbert, the late-night host introduced him as an “OG” Chiefs fan.
“Back like Steve Fuller … those days,” Rudd said to the New York audience, which had no clue that Fuller was the Chiefs’ quarterback in the early ’80s.
Rudd most recently starred in the third season of the Hulu comedy series “Only Murders in the Building” with Martin Short, Steve Martin, Selena Gomez and fellow guest star Meryl Streep. His character, prima donna actor Ben Gilroy, lived in a New York apartment stuffed with memorabilia.
Eagle-eyed fans caught the homage to Rudd’s Kansas City roots. The show customized Chiefs and Royals jerseys with “Gilroy” on the back — No. 16 (as in Len Dawson) and No. 5 (as in George Brett) — and hung them on the wall.
Always a Chiefs fan
Chiefs fans have seen Rudd on the sidelines at big games and watched him celebrate with the players at the rally and parade after Patrick Mahomes won his first Super Bowl in 2020.
The same day “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” premiered in New York with a red carpet event, the Chiefs signed wide receiver Marquise “Hollywood” Brown to a one-year contract, hailed as a good move by a team working on a Super Bowl three-peat.
Rudd knew all about the deal when we spoke to him the next day. Apparently nothing — not even his Hollywood obligations — comes between Rudd and the Chiefs.
“I don’t think I’ve missed watching a Chiefs game in 20 years. I see every one,” declared Rudd, who turns 55 in April.
“I arrange my work schedule around football. I was working when this last Super Bowl happened, and weeks before I asked for just one day off, the day after the Super Bowl, just on the chance that it would happen.”
Oh, it happened, and Rudd was there in Las Vegas with his teen son, Jack, his regular companion now at games. Rudd has been at every Super Bowl that Mahomes has won.
He has befriended Mahomes and Kelce through Big Slick Celebrity Weekend, the annual Children’s Mercy fundraiser he hosts with fellow homegrown celebs Jason Sudeikis, Rob Riggle, Eric Stonestreet, Heidi Gardner and David Koechner. Tickets are now on sale for this year’s event May 31 and June 1.
In the past, when Rudd told people he cheered for the Chiefs, they would tell him: “Awwww, that’s cute.”
Not anymore.
“It’s a strange sensation,” he said. “I think any Chiefs fan would say the same thing.”
So will they three-peat? “I never talk about that,” he said, seriously and quickly, like we’d just asked him for a nuclear code. “I’m such a superstitious person, I never bet on any games, I never make any predictions.
“It sure would be awesome now with the signing of Hollywood Brown and I’m so glad we resigned Drue Tranquill.
“It’s always sad when we lose guys. I love Willie Gay. But I think we’ve got a lot of the right pieces in place.”
‘Really talented people’
He’s still reeling from what he described as the “wild season” that just ended. It’s something like the thrill he felt when director Jason Reitman asked him to be in “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” which came out in 2021.
Jason is the son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the original film in 1984 and the 1989 sequel, “Ghostbusters II.” Rudd couldn’t believe he was being invited to join the Reitman “family business” after Ivan passed the director’s chair to his son for “Afterlife.”
“I think that there was something about ‘Ghostbusters’ when it came out, that mix of funny and yet still a little scary … certainly for kids a nice entry into that genre,” Rudd said. “And also having the benefit of having the funniest cast ever. I remember watching the original … kind of this murderer’s row of really talented people.
“As far as what makes it different for me in these new iterations, it’s this through line of the family. This was such an important thing for Ivan when he made the original, and Jason grew up with ‘Ghostbusters.’ And for “Afterlife,” for Jason to take the reins and have Ivan next to him in the booth, there was something very profound about that.
“This idea of family in the film also exists behind the scenes and the weight of all of that, I felt it and was honored to be a part of it.”
Ivan Reitman died in 2022.
Paul Rudd, fanboy
Rudd, who has worked more than two decades in TV and movies, sounds like a fan when he talks about his “Ghostbusters” co-stars. It was the same with Beyonce and Justin Timberlake.
In November 2008, Rudd hosted “Saturday Night Live” and did a “Single Ladies” skit with the two superstars. Timberlake and “SNL” players Andy Samberg and Bobby Moynihan dressed in black unitards like Beyonce’s backup dancers in the song’s video.
“I’ve had this throughout my career where sometimes I just take a second, I remind myself to step out of it and look at what’s happening here. I’m doing this with Beyonce and Justin Timberlake,” Rudd once told “Hot Ones” host Sean Evans.
He bats away compliments and to this day looks like he wants to run when someone brings up his stint as People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” in 2021.
“Paul Rudd is the most chill guy, although sometimes he’s a little too chill and you forget you’re making a movie ’cause he makes you too relaxed,” Patton Oswalt, who joins the “Frozen Empire” cast, recently told late-night host Andy Cohen while performing his own junket duties.
Rudd, a self-described “comedy nerd” who listened to Steve Martin records as a kid, said there was a lot of nerding out on the “Ghostbusters” set. No surprise here: “Bill Murray will just say a line that’s improvised and it’s an incredible thing to be in the room,” he said.
Hanging out with comedy royalty between takes, Rudd, Oswalt and Kumail Nanjiani, also new to the cast, soaked up every story.
Aykroyd told John Candy stories. Rudd asked Annie Potts — who is back in the role of Janine Melnitz — about working with John Hughes, who directed her in “Pretty in Pink” with Molly Ringwald.
“There was a moment when Kumail, Patton and I, we were all comedy nerds, and Dan Aykroid was with us … I think I asked him how the Blues Brothers started, what was the genesis of that,” Rudd said.
“How did you meet Belushi? What was it like working that first season of ‘SNL’? And then the bar … they (Aykroyd and Belushi) had a bar that turned into the afterparty place … and David Bowie turned up as a bartender.
“I remember we were looking at each other while we were talking to him like, ‘Can you believe we’re listening to this right now?’”
A ‘family’ movie
“Frozen Empire” picks up where “Afterlife” left off three years ago with Rudd back as Gary Grooberson, middle-school science teacher now ghostbuster.
He and love interest Callie Spengler (Carrie Coon) and her two teenage children, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) have moved from Oklahoma into the multi-level Tribeca firehouse that served as headquarters for the original ghostbusters.
In “Afterlife” Callie was introduced as the daughter of original ghostbuster Egon Spengler, played by Harold Ramis, who died in 2014.
In “Frozen Empire,” she and Gary and the kids, a new generation of ghostbusters, team up with the originals to save the world from a second Ice Age after an ancient artifact unleashes legions of ghosts that throw New York into a deep freeze.
The new nemesis is the huge, horned Garraka, who can freeze people into human popsicles that shatter like glass.
“Tall, dark and horny,” Murray calls him.
We asked Rudd if he has a reallife ghost story. “I’ve had weird moments with Ouija boards,” he said. “I don’t mess around with Ouija boards.”
While the ghostbusters scramble to save the world yet again, Rudd’s character must figure out his relationship with the two teens he’s living with. What is his place in the family dynamic?
Is he buddy or stepfather? (Spoiler alert: A single word in the last few minutes of the movie answers that question.)
“I think relating to any teenage girl as a parent … I’m familiar with that. I know what that’s like,” said Rudd, who also plays a girl-dad in his “Ant-Man” movies.
He mentioned his 14-year-old daughter, Darby, to Colbert when he said he talked about how he got “all choked up” this past football season hearing stories of Swiftie girls watching Chiefs games with their fathers. “My daughter knows a ton about football,” Rudd said. “She watches the Chiefs games, too.”