Paul Rudd Surprised By First-Ever Golden Globes Nomination

The star of Netflix's 'Living With Yourself' reflects on the "frenetic" pace of filming the series and acting opposite himself.

Paul Rudd was awake when the nominations for the Golden Globe Awards were announced on Monday — "I've got kids," he says with a laugh — but he wasn't tuned in to hear that he'd earned his first-ever Globe nod for the Netflix series Living With Yourself.

"I got texts from people," Rudd tells The Hollywood Reporter about his nomination for best actor in a comedy series. "I wasn't watching because it didn't even occur to me that I could."

Below, Rudd talks to THR about acting opposite himself while playing two characters — he didn't use a stand-in for most scenes — and the "frenetic" pace of filming the series, created by Timothy Greenberg and directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.

There was a learning curve. We started to zero in on how it would work best, and I think we all just got used to it — the cinematographer, the directors, all of us. The main thing just became eye lines and really trying to figure out how we could make it look like I was looking right across from me, and blur my eyes enough so it would look like I was looking three feet in front of me instead of 20 feet away, which is what you'd normally do if you put an "X" on the wall.

How did you find the pace of filming the show compared to working on a feature film?

It's a self-contained show, so the way we went about it was no different than making a movie, and that's the way we viewed it. The only difference was that, ostensibly, we were making a four-and-a-half-hour movie in the same amount of time you'd make a regular film, and we'd have to do scenes several times for technical reasons, with me playing two characters. So the pace was frenetic and intense. Thankfully, we had Dayton and Faris directing it, and they kept everything on track.

Is there a version of one of your characters that's closer to your own personality?

There are elements of my personality in both characters, and at the same time, they're fictional creations.

Have you discussed a second season yet, or was the show intended to finish after these eight episodes?

I had signed on for a season, but none of that's been discussed. And also it sort of just came out [on Oct. 18]. I haven't really thought ahead about it.