Actor Paul Rudd raised a few eyebrows when he said Jesus in the historical figure he would most like to meet. The Overland Park native, perhaps best known for his roles in the “Ant-Man” and “Ghostbusters” movies, also gives back to the community through the annual Big Slick fundraiser.
He mentioned Jesus while discussing his latest film, “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.”
He said people sometimes laugh when he answers “Jesus,” even though he believes it’s an obvious reply. “If you guys could go back in time and spend a day with anyone in history, who would you choose?” Simon Harkness asked Rudd and co-stars Mckenna Grace and Finn Wolfhard.
“Anyone from history, who would we choose?” Rudd replied. “I know my answer: Jesus Christ.”
Grace and Wolfhard, already laughing from one of his previous answers, started giggling again. “Laugh all you want,” Rudd said, standing firm.
Wolfhard then questioned if Jesus was real. “He existed,” Rudd said. “Wouldn’t you want to spend some time with him and go, ‘Jesus, what’s the deal?’”
“It’s genuinely a great answer,” Wolfhard acknowledged.
“Fantastic answer,” Grace said.
“You say this, and people are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you can’t say that,’” Rudd said. “And I’d say, ‘Why?’ That’s who I would choose.”
It’s not the first time Rudd has given such an answer. In 2018, Rudd told an interviewer “People say, ‘Who would you have dinner with,’ and I say, ‘Jesus Christ.’ And people laugh. They think that I’m kidding.”
Rudd is Jewish. “My whole family is Jewish; my wife, Julie, is Jewish — there isn’t anyone in my family who isn’t Jewish,” he said. “I was bar mitzvahed Reform; we were pretty laid back, but it’s like, oh yeah, I went to synagogue. We have a lineage that is so many thousands of years old that you just relate. It is a tribe; it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s my team,’ and I feel that for sure.”
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice
IMAGE: Red Carpet Report on Mingle Media TV. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0