It’s been nearly 24 years since Clueless was first released, but even after all this time, there’s one unexpected detail from the 1995 cult classic that makes Paul Rudd cringe to this day.
The 49-year-old actor opened up about the blink-and-you-miss-it detail during the Clueless reunion panel at the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (C2E2) on Saturday, March 23. He was joined on stage by Alicia Silverstone, Donald Faison and Breckin Meyer, who also starred in the hit movie.
At one point in the film, Rudd’s character, Josh, makes a sandwich for himself. When the actor was asked by an audience member if there was any advice he’d give his younger self while filming the flick, that scene immediately came to mind for a rather unlikely reason. “When I go to the kitchen and I make the sandwich, I would put the mayonnaise on the bread, and not directly onto the turkey itself,” he dished.
As eagle-eyed Clueless watchers may have noticed, Rudd does, in fact, awkwardly put the mayo on the meat and not on the surrounding bread while making his meal. For the Role Models actor, that move made the scene particularly uncomfortable, so much so that he still remembers it over two decades later. “A little thing about me is I hate mayonnaise and I hate condiments. And it skeeved me out,” he explained. “I had never had mayonnaise on a sandwich.”
Apparently, the awkward arrangement of the ingredients came from trepidation Rudd felt while filming the bit. “I was so nervous with the timing of the scene, I just put the mayonnaise on the turkey,” he recalled. “Now, when I see that scene, it’s like nails on a chalkboard.”
Cringe-worthy moments aside, the Ant-Man star has plenty of fond memories from filming Clueless. “I loved working with Alicia,” he said, adding that he even lived with Faison and Meyer, both 44, for a portion of the shoot. “It was a blast, the whole thing.”
The Screen Actors Guild Award nominee also revealed that many of the clothes he wore in the movie were actually from his own wardrobe. “Half of those were my own!” he dished. “That was my own Amnesty T-shirt, my own KU hat, which they lost, by the way.”
The goatee that he sported in the movie was also all Rudd. “I grew that myself,” he quipped.
Though Rudd and his onscreen character differed in their interests (he “loved comedy” while Josh was passionate about environmental law), the two also had some similarities. “I was very into fashionable clothing, or so I thought, and I had a sticker that said, ‘Why be normal?’” he explained. “I thought, ‘I’m gonna put this on our car, but I’m gonna put it upside down.’ Brilliant. That was me at 16.”
With reporting by Nicole Briese
