PicoBlog

Thank you so much for reading The Wilder Things. If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter so far, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! $5 a month gets you every single newsletter, the ability to comment, and access to the archives. Also —if you get even just three people to subscribe, you get a discount! So smash that subscribe and share button. I am so grateful for your support.

Four years ago, I met Paul Rudd and tweeted about it. The tweets went viral, and they have continued to do so at least once a year since. TikTok and Instagram accounts with names like “positivity daily,” or “feel good vibes,” or “the world is a hellscape so here are some fuzzy animals” will pick them up and aggregate them. Without fail, people my husband and I haven’t talked to since high school send us the posts and say, “This is Charlotte!” It’s a lovely way to hear from folks.

The story gets recirculated up a lot, but I’ve never told it. Seeing as the Chiefs are once again playing in the AFC Championship today, which was why any of this happened at all, I figured this is as good a time as any.

The whole thing started at LaGuardia airport in January of 2020. This was not New LaGuardia with grand fountains, clean bathrooms, and big, airy windows that make you feel like you’re at a fancy mall. No, this was Old Laguardia. It had blue carpets strewn with mysterious crumbs, low ceilings, and poorly designed food courts. It made going to the airport feel like waiting inside the world’s largest DMV. 

I was at the airport because, through the NFL playoffs, I’d been following the Tennessee Titans’ unexpected run. I’d gone to Baltimore the week before and witnessed the Titans’ surprising win in the divisional round (I also had the distinct pleasure of asking then-Titans head coach Mike Vrabel why he said he’d cut off his dick to win a Super Bowl).  Tennessee was now facing the buzz saw that was — and still is — the Kansas City Chiefs. The Titans were on the way to Arrowhead Stadium. So was I. 

And so, it turned out, was Paul Rudd.

He stood in line, waiting to board the same plane as I, next to a guy who looked a lot like him. They were both wearing Chiefs jerseys. The night before, I had finished Rudd’s TV show Living With Yourself. I’d just spent the past week with this man in my living room, and here he was, in the flesh. 

Now, if you’re somehow not familiar with this extremely famous man, he is an actor known for Clueless, Friends, and a bunch of early-aughts Judd Apatow movies, among many other things. He’s also a star in the Marvel universe. He grew up in Kansas. 

It’s relevant to this story that I remind you that January of 2020 was only a few months after Rudd’s Hot Ones interview had gone viral. Remember the, “Hey, look at us” meme? Here it is, for reference. 

The internet was hot on this one (pun not originally intended, but now it is). The internet was also just generally, well, hot. It wasn’t as fun as it had been five years before, but it wasn’t yet the algorithmic, monopolized hell that it’s become in the past four. Twitter was still Twitter, and tweeting was still fun, even though we complained about Twitter all the time, calling it “the hellsite.” Which is ironic, because we didn’t know what a true hellsite was until Elon Musk took it over. 

So, naturally, the first thing I did when I got to my window seat in coach was tweet:

“Paul Rudd is on my flight to KC and I’m fighting the urge to stop by his seat and say, ‘Hey, look at us. Who would’ve thought?’ just to see if he’ll say, ‘Not me!’”

Replies rushed to my phone. People told me I had to do it. I began to overheat, which regularly happens to me when I am about to do something embarrassing for the sake of a story. I told myself that if I didn’t say hello to Rudd, I was a coward who let down her followers. 

The truth is that I wanted to say hello to him. I loved Rudd’s work and had long admired his comedic brilliance. I also thought he seemed like a nice guy. If I’m being completely honest, his celebrity offered me a chance to have some fun online that a lot of people would see. 

Rudd was sitting in first class. As soon as the captain turned off the seatbelt sign, I wriggled by everyone in my row and headed for the front of the plane instead of the bathroom behind me. A flight attendant eyed me from a jump seat near the cockpit. Time was of the essence. 

Rudd was in a window seat playing Candy Crush on an iPad. The guy who looked like him sat next to him. I cleared my throat and they both looked up. If I’d been hot before, I was really sweating now. I hadn’t really planned what I was going to say. 

“Hi Paul,” I heard myself say. “I’m Charlotte Wilder with Sports Illustrated, sorry to bother you.”

Rudd looked up. He smiled. 

“Hi Charlotte, this is my son Jack,” Rudd said, which was a very gracious way to handle a stranger looming over him. 

“Hi Jack, nice to meet you,” I said, shaking Jack’s hand. I looked back at Rudd. 

“I really loved Living With Yourself,” I said, the words falling out on top of each other. “I felt like I spent my week with you! Haha! Also, I was going to come up here and say, ‘Hey, look at us, who would’ve thought,’ but I didn’t, so, you’re welcome!”

Rudd laughed what seemed like a genuine — if somewhat confused — laugh and thanked me.

“Also,” I said, “If you want to talk about the Chiefs this weekend, I’m your girl!” 

"Okay,” Rudd said. “If I want to talk about the Chiefs, I'll find you." 

I felt someone come up behind me.

“Ma’am,” the flight attendant said. “You need to return to your seat. This is for first class passengers only.”

I did as I was told, glowing with triumph and a little bit of shame. I had secured the content. I tweeted out the interaction.

Share

***

Attending a big sports game as a reporter feels like being at the center of the universe. The lights are bright, the speakers are loud, the crowd hums with anticipation. Pyrotechnics and dry ice erupt sporadically. Having access to corners of the stadium closed off to the public feels like being a little kid let loose backstage at a Broadway show. I can peek behind the curtain and poke around.

Arrowhead Stadium rises up out of a huge expanse of Missouri parking lots; it looks like a massive tiara that a giant set down and left there, stuck in the asphalt. People stack themselves into the skeletal structure, cheering so intensely that the steel bones shake in the middle of nowhere on the flat, midwestern plains. It generates its own specific kind of electricity on game days. 

On the day the Chiefs beat the Titans to go to Super Bowl LIV, it was one of the loudest places I’ve ever been. As the red and yellow confetti rained down onto the field, I left the sterile press box, taking the elevator down to the visiting locker room so I could collect quotes from the Titans. 

Losing locker rooms are, second to funeral homes, the most formally depressing places I’ve ever been. All the players on the losing team have to do the same things they always do after games — untape all of their joints, take off their pads, shower, etc. But they have to do so as losers. There’s something particularly deflating and intimate about watching a football player answer questions as to why the team failed while he’s fresh out of the shower, with red eyes and a towel wrapped around his waist. 

I got some sad quotes from some sad Titans players and went back up to the press box to write my story about how sad the Titans were (and how they said they’d be back next year, even though they wouldn’t). I kept Twitter open on my computer as I wrote to make sure I didn’t miss any new information about Tennessee. Then I saw someone tweet, “Paul Rudd is in the Chiefs locker room.”

Reader, I have never abandoned a task faster. I jumped out of my seat and ran to the elevator bay. The cars were delayed, so I headed for the stairs and flew down the many flights into the depths of the stadium. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that I full-on sprinted through the hallways and into the Chiefs locker room. I stood there, panting, as I scanned the space.

Paul Rudd and his son were right in the middle. 

I don’t know whether it was the adrenaline of the hunt, or whether I was intoxicated by the excitement of the environment and really thought Rudd was my friend, but I have never so confidently taken strides toward someone I don’t know. He was facing away from me, and I tapped him on the shoulder. 

“Paul!” I exclaimed. “It’s me, Charlotte, the girl from the plane!”

Rudd turned around, beaming. He threw out his arms, looked at me, and said, “Hey, look at us. Who would’ve thought?” 

***

Back in the press box, I was about to post the photo that I’d asked Rudd’s son Jack to take of me and his dad. It’s worth noting that I really hated this picture of myself. I still do. But that wouldn’t stop me from tweeting it, because vanity is the enemy of success when you work on the internet. I craved the dopamine hit that came with virality. I was also excited to close the loop on the bit that I’d started on the plane. I thought it would make people happy to see that Rudd had remembered what I said and turned it into a delightful inside joke. I felt like I was standing on the edge of a high dive, about to execute a perfect flip. 

I hit “tweet” and waited, suspended underwater for a moment while the post took hold. When I came up for air, the response was louder than I could’ve imagined.

The picture had hundreds of retweets within a minute. People tweeted things at me like this: “This is an all-time story. If I were you I would already be rehearsing it in a mirror with a stopwatch and creating different versions of it for different audiences. I'd have a 30-second version, a three-minute version, a five-minute version.”

And this: “Is Paul Rudd really just everything we all hoped he would be?” and “Paul Rudd seems like an awesome dude 😆” and “This is the story Twitter was invented for.” 

Almost every celebrity and sports site in America picked my tweets up. News sites as far away as India aggregated them. I gained more new followers on Instagram and Twitter from this one interaction than I have for anything before or since. 

And every time it goes viral once again, I spend a lot of time wondering why. 

Part of it is that anything interesting Paul Rudd does will go global. He is, as of this writing, perhaps the least controversial white guy in America. I’ve never met someone who doesn’t like Rudd’s work or public persona. In a celebrity-obsessed culture where gossip and controversy reign supreme, people are hungry for something that feels nice without being boring. This was a satisfying narrative arc with a beginning, a middle, and an unexpected ending. A happy unexpected ending. 

Celebrities constantly misstep, get “canceled” (without actually being canceled, let’s be honest), and disappoint fans when their image doesn’t match their actions. My interaction with Rudd seemed to prove to people that he is as kind in real life as they want him to be. If the rule is “never meet your heroes,” this short story made Rudd the exception, and I stood in as the everywoman lucky enough to prove it.

***

Two years after we first met on that plane, I was once again at Arrowhead for the AFC Championship. Someone I know sneakily gave me Rudd’s number, and I texted him out of the blue (“it’s the girl from the plane”).

He responded — immediately and, once again, far too kindly — and agreed to meet up with me. On the day of the game, I camped out in the celebrity entrance of the stadium with some help from a sympathetic security guard. Rudd came in from visiting the field before kickoff, his son Jack behind him. We chatted for a little bit and he agreed to make this video with me. 

Charlotte Wilder on Instagram: “Two years after I said “hey, look at us,” on a plane and he said “who would’ve thought?” in the Chiefs’ locker room, Paul Rudd and I reunited at Arrowhead once again for the AFC Championship. Sometimes it’s okay to meet your heroes 🏈🏟🤝”

January 28, 2024

It didn’t go viral the way the first one did, because everyone already knew the story. I was gilding the lily. Our moment had come and gone, just like everything does on the internet.

But Rudd was still gracious enough to make a sequel, as he’s done with his Marvel movies. He kept the narrative going, even though it’s never as exciting the second time. I once again felt triumphant and a little grimy as he lent his fame to me in an age when the only currency that really matters is attention. 

Who would’ve thought?

Leave a comment

ncG1vNJzZmismJrEqrjDnqmtoJmjtLR60q6ZrKyRmLhvr86mZqlnmWK6psCMqZiupF2nwqWwjJqrZqyYmnpzfJFpZJqek2Kwqa3MqaCopqOdtrE%3D