Originally, Paul Rudd didn’t want to be on the cover of Men’s Health.
“My first reaction to being in Men’s Health was: I can’t. There’s no way,” Rudd explained, in his interview for the cover of Men’s Health. “But [my rep] said, ‘No, you don’t understand. You’re doing the magazine.’ So I thought, It’s gonna motivate me. It’s gonna force me into [working out]. And it did.”
Rudd had a caveat.
“But the fitness that I do now has less to do with the fact that I might have to do another Marvel movie or a magazine shoot and more because I finally understand if you make fitness a part of your lifestyle, you’ll just feel good.”
And that’s Paul Rudd’s fitness Zen in a nutshell.
Still, there are some moments when working out to look good is frustratingly requisite. Like, presumably, for a cover. Also: a Marvel movie.
“If I’m doing one of these movies and I know that in four months I have to do a shirtless scene, I’m pretty dialed in,” Rudd says.
For Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Rudd’s most recent appearance as Marvel Comics’ Scott Lang, Rudd says he had to work out extra hard.
“I worked really hard to get back into shape for Quantumania, and I realized, Oh my God, this is so much harder than it was [for the last Ant-Man project]. I had fallen off more than I had in the past. All of a sudden my clothes fit tight. And I thought, God, this sucks. I can’t even wear these pants. So I’d say to myself, Well, I might as well just eat some of these cookies. I was irritable and self-conscious. I just wasn’t in a good mood. I really beat myself up.”
Rudd, however, had already learned a lesson in humility after the first Ant-Man. Rudd trained hard for a shirtless scene. And then …
“The shirtless scene was cut,” Rudd says. “Ultimately the movie was running long, and the scene wasn’t essential.”
The scene is now a blink- and-you-miss-it side view of Rudd’s torso.
“On one hand, I was annoyed because I put in a year’s worth of hard work,” Rudd says. “On the other, if I had to look at myself shirtless in a Marvel movie, I would just want to make fun of it in every single way.”
Though Rudd trained hard again for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, he had already long internalized that humility. Of that original Ant-Man body, the one that never truly saw the camera, Rudd admitted it really wasn’t all that great.
“I would feel kind of like an idiot walking around without my shirt on. Because that’s not my style.”
Another lesson in Zen.
Assistant Editor
Joshua St Clair is an Assistant Editor at Men’s Health Magazine.
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