During an interview earlier this year, famous actor Paul Rudd was asked who he would meet if he had the opportunity to interact with one person in all of history. Rudd proclaimed without hesitation that he would pick our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
The question occurred during an interview to promote Rudd’s latest movie with co-stars Finn Wolfhard and McKenna Grace. “Anyone from history, who would we choose?” Rudd asked. “I know my answer: Jesus Christ.”
Upon Rudd giving his answer Wolfhard and Grace burst into laughing. However, Rudd remained firm in his answer. “By the way,” said the actor, “laugh all you want, and it seems like it would be a wrong thing to say.” Wolfhard seemed to question whether Jesus Christ was “real,” to which Rudd pointed out “He existed…so wouldn’t you want to spend some time with him and go, ‘Jesus, what’s the deal?’”
Wolfhard admitted that Rudd had a good point, conceding, “It’s true,” and that it was a “genuinely great answer.” Grace also weighed in that it was a “fantastic answer.” Rudd contiued, “You say this and people think like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, you can’t say that,’ and I’d say, ‘Well, why? That’s who I would choose.”
Rudd has consistently expressed his Jewish heritage and his faith. The actor noted that his entire family is Jewish and stated how the group is a “tribe.” He told the Jewish Journal, “My whole family is Jewish; my wife, Julie, is Jewish – there isn’t anyone in my family who isn’t Jewish. 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.”
Rudd also explained the importance of his family. ”When I think about myself, I think of myself as a husband and a father, like I’m that,” he told PEOPLE. “I just hang out with my family when I’m not working. That’s what I kind of like the most.”
Aside from Paul Rudd, other famous actors have expressed a keen interest in Jesus Christ, such as Russell Brand, who recently became a Christian. The Christian Tribune reported on his one-month update since getting baptized.
“I’ve been a Christian a month now and it’s been a big change,” he said. “Not that I’ve entirely changed as a person, of course I haven’t, but I’ve taken on a lot of new concepts and it changes you to accept that it’s not like you’re in a game show and by doing really, really good things you can get redeemed.”
“No, repentance, to repent, means that you have to continually change and acknowledge that I am in a battle against myself,” he added. “That I need to surrender myself to an ever-present eternal and accessible Jesus. That mercy is something that’s been given to me, been granted to me, that I live with through love, not something that I can sort of win or achieve by doing good deeds.”
Featured image credit: Red Carpet Report on Mingle Media TV from Culver City, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_Rudd_(cropped).jpg