Paul Rudd: “I Like Music to Slit Your Wrists By!”

“I’m a masochist,” says Paul Rudd. “Most of the music I like is music to slit your wrists by.” This fondness for gloomy tunes comes as something of a surprise, given the 35-year-old actor’s goofball demeanor — in the space of an hour, he performs at least four comic impersonations.

The Kansas native first came to attention with his role in the 1995 hit Clueless. Since then, he’s zigzagged between theater, indie-arthouse films such as The Shape of Things and Wet Hot American Summer and mainstream fare, including a part on Friends as Mike, Phoebe’s boyfriend and eventual husband. This summer, Rudd plays a smarmy ’70s newscaster alongside Will Ferrell in the comedy Anchorman, a job that called for a luxurious Burt Reynolds–esque mustache. “I totally wanted to keep it,” the actor says, mustering up faux indignation, “but fuckin’ Friends made me shave it off.”

Perhaps it’s due to the black coffee he drinks in an Italian restaurant a few blocks away from the Greenwich Village apartment he shares with his wife, but Rudd becomes quite animated, rocking back and forth in his seat, when it comes time to discuss his record collection. An avowed music fiend, his early jobs included stints working in a CD store and as a bar mitzvah DJ (“In regard to what I played, well, it only takes one word: Hammer”). Compiling his list proved excruciating. “I knew it would take me a while, because I’m not that unlike John Cusack’s character in High Fidelity,” he admits. “I didn’t know, naively, it would be like Sophie’s Choice.”

Steve Martin, A Wild and Crazy Guy
Warner Bros., 1978
“This influenced me more than anything. It dawned on me: ‘Wow, he’s making a living by talking — what a cool job!’ I listened to it recently and still knew all the words. He came backstage at a play I was in, but I couldn’t say much. I almost didn’t want to meet him — he was too important.”


Stray Cats, Built for Speed
DCC, 1982
“I went through a big Stray Cats phase in seventh grade — combed my hair in a pompadour, wore white T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up. My first concert was Stray Cats. My dad agreed to take me because it reminded him of the music he listened to when he was a kid, so he thought he could stand it.”


The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs
Merge, 1999
“Courtney Love told me to get this album. We met doing the movie 200 Cigarettes and always talked music. This is a masterpiece. I find it impossible to get sick of — when I look back over the last four years of my life, this has been the soundtrack to all the highs and lows.”


Tom Waits, Rain Dogs
Island, 1985
“When I was 24, a close friend of mine died in a car wreck. We were both huge Tom Waits fans. I had a five-disc CD player, and I had Tom Waits records going 24 hours a day so Justin could listen to him, too. Tom Waits filled the role of grief counselor for me.”


Elvis Costello, Imperial Bedroom
Rhino, 1982
“This reminds me of a trip I took to Greece while I was a student at the University of Kansas. I was on a ferry from Athens to Santorini, listening to this album on my Walkman. All the stars aligned in this perfect moment, which I’ve been trying to recapture ever since. With limited success.”


Glen Campbell, Wichita Lineman
Capitol, 1968
“‘Wichita Lineman’ is my favorite love song. I’ve sung it at karaoke way too many times. Probably the first album I ever bought was a Glen Campbell record. I was into the movie Convoy, too. I learned the CB lingo and would slip it into conversation. ‘Ten-one-hundred’ meant you had to pee.”


R.E.M., Reckoning
IRS, 1983
“Before this came out, I was into anything with synthesizers. I was crazy about Depeche Mode, Yaz and Blancmange. But when I first heard this, I thought, ‘Damn, now I get why people really like guitars!’ That was a bar mitzvah album for me — not that I got it for my bar mitzvah, but I became a man that day.”


The Pogues, Best of the Pogues
Phantom, 1991
“In my early twenties, I went to Ireland by myself. I was just like every idiotic American growing a beard and drinking Guinness. But none of that mattered, because there was another pure moment: listening to the Pogues on my Walkman on the rocks of Dingle, thinking, ‘It just doesn’t get any better than this.’”


Stevie Wonder, At the Close of a Century
Motown, 1999
“Stevie is my favorite singer ever. The only thing I never erase from my TiVo is this show I taped two years ago, Glen Campbell’s Goodtime Hour, where Stevie does ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ with Glen Campbell. That one clip justifies the entire existence of my TiVo.”


Radiohead, Ok Computer
Capitol, 1997
“This came out when I was filming The Object of My Affection, and I remember racing to Tower Records to buy it the day it came out, running back to my trailer and not coming out until I’d heard it all the way through. Nothing else went into my CD player for two years. I was so into it, I developed a lazy eye.”