The problem is that Paul Rudd isn’t speaking from a position of superiority: he admits that he’s just as glued to his cellphone as anyone else.
The actor said that he stopped bringing it to film sets a while ago, and that during A Statement, director Tom McCarthy went even further: he outright banned phones on set. The result? Instead of killing time by looking at a screen, the cast ended up sitting around, talking, and spending time together.
“We don’t look at or talk to each other the same way anymore”, said Rudd, who felt that working this way was almost like returning to a film shoot in the 80s, when there wasn’t a cellphone to pull out every five minutes.
And perhaps that’s why he was so harsh when talking about the subject. Not because he’s overcome his addiction, but precisely because he’s still struggling with it: “I’m as addicted as everyone else”.
The unsettling thing is that all it took was removing the cellphones from the room for everyone to start talking again. And if we need to have our phones taken away to remember to look at the person right in front of us, perhaps Paul Rudd isn’t exaggerating that much 😳