Every actor has to start their career somewhere, and regardless of where they end up in the long run, for whatever reason, there’s a distinct possibility that any star who currently resides near the top of the A-list will have appeared in a low budget horror movie as one of their earliest credited roles.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Aniston made their feature film debuts in Critters 3 and Leprechaun respectively, George Clooney and Laura Dern were both in 1983’s Grizzly II: The Revenge, future Academy Award winners Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger played the leads in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, Kevin Bacon and Johnny Depp showed up at the start of the slasher boom in Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Charlize Theron made a brief appearance in Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, and the list goes on and on.
Paul Rudd’s first movie role, meanwhile, may have been in beloved cult classic Clueless, but he followed it up with a turn as Tommy Doyle in Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers. And up above, you can catch his audition tape for the part.
Of course, the sequel, which was bizarrely almost written by Quentin Tarantino, was widely panned by critics, but did manage to earn over $15 million at the box office on a $5 million budget. So at least it was profitable.
While Rudd admitted in the years after that he was genuinely concerned that the reception to Halloween 6 would kill his career before it even got started in earnest, we’re now over a quarter of a century down the line and he’s a bigger and more popular name than ever before, headlining his own standalone Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero franchise for good measure.
