Dave Itzkoff

They were up-and-comers enjoying early tastes of steady work and visibility, and they knew each other by name and reputation. They compared résumés, sized each other up — Pacino still remembers De Niro as having “an unusual look and a certain energy” — and each walked away wondering what the future held for himself and the man he had just met.

A half-century later, they ambled into a suite at a luxury hotel on the River Thames to talk about their new film, “The Irishman,” with so many of those uncertainties put to rest long ago. Whatever can be achieved as an actor, De Niro and Pacino have pretty much done it, surpassing even the outsize aspirations they had as young men. They have provided cinema with some of its most transfixing and explosive protagonists, in landmark films like — let’s just get these out of the way — “Taxi Driver,” “Scarface,” “Raging Bull” and the “Godfather” series.

In doing so, their trajectories have become unexpectedly intertwined. They are not only peers and occasional collaborators but genuine friends who occasionally find time to check in, contemplate possible projects and push each other’s buttons.

“We get together and talk, compare notes,” De Niro explained. “Not quite miss each other. We might miss each other.”

Perhaps most surprising of all is that at a moment when they could easily rest on their laurels — and have sometimes been accused of doing just that — Pacino, 79, and De Niro, 76, continue to care immensely about their craft.

“The Irishman,” which opens theatrically Nov. 1 and will be released Nov. 27 on Netflix, is directed by Martin Scorsese, and it puts the two actors on screen together for only the third time. The film, a crime drama of sweeping scope and ambition, is retrospective by design and decidedly conscious of the fact that eventually, everything ends.

That is a theme with deep resonance for Pacino, who plays Jimmy Hoffa, the unmanageable president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and for De Niro, who is a producer of the film and plays its title character, Frank Sheeran, a Teamsters official and mobster who claimed credit for Hoffa’s murder.

Both actors are mindful of their legacies, too, and in “The Irishman” they are giving performances that are as vital as ever. Only now, if they have nothing more to prove to audiences, they find motivation in surpassing their own bench marks and keeping pace with each other.

In the rare instances when they get to work side by side, Pacino said, “it takes the edge off. And puts the other edge on.”

They loom so large in the popular consciousness that they are preceded by caricatures, which aren’t entirely unfounded. Pacino, his long hair tied in a ponytail, is the more rhapsodic, and the clean-cut De Niro is the more reticent of the pair. (Asked how he and Scorsese came to cast Pacino in “The Irishman,” De Niro answered, “I said, ‘Marty, what do you think about Al for Hoffa?’ He said, ‘Yeah, great.’”)

But they also share a decades-old shorthand, and when seated together, they draw each other out and enjoy tweaking each other. They both took great delight in the notion that Pacino would have had to try out for “The Irishman.”

“Yeah, I asked him if he could read a few lines of it,” De Niro said sarcastically. He put up a hand and abruptly concluded the imaginary audition: “Oh, that’s great, OK,” he said.

Pacino played along and, in a soft, gravelly voice, described how he would have handled the hypothetical assignment: “You say, ‘Listen, I’ve been working on this — it’s not your script but I’m doing ‘King Lear’ and now I’ll read you a few excerpts,’” he said.

They laughed, and, as he really does when he is amused, De Niro narrowed his eyes, contorted his face into that famous ear-to-ear grin and glanced around the room.

If they can share a joke about their elite status now, it’s because they bonded back when their renown was hardly assured, and they never forgot the constant rejection that they had to endure in their formative days. As Pacino explained, “I say to young actors today, no matter what you do, don’t ever expect to get the role.” (“Consider that a given,” De Niro added.)

They both came of age in post-World War II New York, Pacino in the South Bronx and De Niro in Greenwich Village and Little Italy. Both were children of divorce who were drawn into the city’s acting schools — the Actors Studio, the Stella Adler Studio of Acting and HB Studio — and were enthralled by these institutions’ influential alumni, like Marlon Brando, James Dean, Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley.

Acting let them steep themselves in the lives of others and surprise themselves with their spontaneity. Explaining their divergent approaches in an email, Scorsese said, “I suppose I could say that Al tends to go toward fluidity and music while Bob likes to locate states of mind and being, settling in. But that’s just a matter of their instincts and personal orientations, I think. They’re both tremendous artists with powerful ‘instruments,’ as an acting teacher might put it.”

Pacino’s earliest breakthroughs arrived in the stage plays “The Indian Wants the Bronx” and “Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?,” while De Niro’s came with the films “Bang the Drum Slowly” and “Mean Streets” (his first movie with Scorsese). The actors’ fledgling friendship became more crucial once their careers gained momentum and they turned to each other as colleagues who could understand the awkwardness of their emerging celebrity.

“We were in an unusual position,” Pacino said. “It was a whole different idea, being well-known. Not quite the way it is now. It was not as accessible, to be famous.” More archly, he added, “It hadn’t caught on yet.”

De Niro agreed. “It was a good thing that we had each other to talk about stuff,” he said.

Nothing transformed their lives like Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” movies. Pacino’s place in the pantheon was secured with the original 1972 film and his quietly captivating portrayal of Michael Corleone — a part that De Niro, among many other actors, had vied for.

Not that he regarded Pacino as his rival: “You’re not competitive,” said De Niro, who had also eyed the role of reckless Sonny Corleone that went to James Caan.

“If a person gets a part and they’re great in it, that’s fine,” he explained. “It’s when an actor is not good for it and they’re chosen for the wrong reasons, then you are regretful and not even jealous. You say, well, OK, there you go. That’s just what it is.”

De Niro won his first Academy Award for “The Godfather Part II,” released two years later, in which he played the young incarnation of Vito Corleone. (“I said I want Bob to be my dad,” Pacino joked.)

Getting them to appear on screen together seemed for years like an unattainable feat, although not for lack of trying: They nearly co-starred in “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (Eric Roberts and Mickey Rourke did instead); in Bernardo Bertolucci’s “1900” (De Niro did, Pacino didn’t); and in James Foley’s film version of “Glengarry Glen Ross” (Pacino yes, De Niro no). Asked why any of these pairings didn’t coalesce, they could only shrug their shoulders and cite the vagaries of time.

They did finally collide, fleetingly but spectacularly, in Michael Mann’s 1995 crime drama, “Heat,” about a resourceful thief (De Niro) and the dogged police investigator (Pacino) on his trail. Mann explained in an interview that he sought the actors not only for their cinematic cachet but also because they personified the idea of men who could be both parallel and wildly dissimilar.

“There’s a thesis and an antithesis, and they have some characteristics in common, and the ones that aren’t in common are polar opposites,” Mann said of the actors. “Al learns his dialogue two weeks ahead of time — it’s a free-form, psychological absorption. Bob is determined to be completely in the moment.”

The result, Mann said, is that “they both have a total artistic immersion — the way they get to that is radically different.”

Thirteen years elapsed before De Niro and Pacino would reunite, in “Righteous Kill,” a garden-variety buddy-cop drama that neither remembers especially fondly. “We did it,” De Niro said humbly. “We did it.”

Even then, the wheels were turning slowly on “The Irishman,” a film that emerged from De Niro’s fascination with Charles Brandt’s book “I Heard You Paint Houses.” The book, which De Niro discovered while researching another potential project with Scorsese, chronicles Sheeran’s rise through a Pennsylvania crime family as it supposedly intersects with the sagas of Hoffa and the Kennedy family.

“It had this grand size to the story,” De Niro said. “It had historical figures whose outcomes had been unresolved, and this story had those answers, according to this character, which I believed.”

But getting the film made would take more than a decade as De Niro and his collaborators waited for Steven Zaillian to finish a script and for a slot to open up in Scorsese’s relentless schedule. “The Irishman” also needed the patronage of Netflix, which picked up the reported $160 million budget. A portion of that cost includes special effects used to digitally de-age De Niro, Pacino and Joe Pesci in scenes about their characters’ younger days. (De Niro said they also considered casting younger actors to play them in these sequences.)

“The Irishman” is the ninth feature film De Niro has made with Scorsese but the first Pacino has shot for the director. Even though they were acquainted — Pacino sought out Scorsese many years ago to direct an unrealized project in which he would have played Modigliani — Scorsese still wanted some advance intelligence on his less-familiar star.

As De Niro recalled, “Marty said, ‘What’s Al like?’ I said, ‘He’s a sweetheart. You’ll see.’” (Pacino did not mind the description. “You see me smiling,” he said.)

Beyond the chance to work with Scorsese and each other, De Niro and Pacino saw “The Irishman” as an opportunity to once again invest themselves in real-life figures and pore over documents and recordings of these men as they constructed their characters from the inside out.

Pacino, who in recent years has portrayed a string of real people like Joe Paterno, Phil Spector and Jack Kevorkian, said his responsibility was not to duplicate Hoffa but to play the version of him that he found most compelling.

“You have to find the fictionalization of it in some way,” Pacino said. “You have to find the drama and the character. Because otherwise, do a documentary on someone.”

In a gentler voice, he added, “I want to play George Washington. I do, by the way.”

De Niro seemed genuinely surprised by that. “You do?” he said quizzically. “OK.”

They acknowledged that they were drawn in by the elegiac tone of “The Irishman,” which follows its characters — the ones who survive, anyway — into senescence and leaves them, largely in solitude, to wonder how history will remember them.

Scorsese said it was appropriate and inevitable that he and his leading men would want to explore this mournful subject matter. “I think we all share that need to look back — me, Bob, Al, Joe, the characters they’re playing,” he said. “But that’s the age we’re at. We just wanted to give form to it in the cinema.”

But the actors found it a delicate task to explain why this facet of the film appealed to them and for obvious reasons: Who wants to admit that he is nearer to the end of things than to the beginning? As Mann put it, “Does one walk around thinking, oh, I’m an elder statesman now? Or do you still secretly think, who am I going to be when I grow up?”

With some hesitation, De Niro said that he and Pacino had to reckon with the existential questions that “The Irishman” raises.

“We’re at a point where we’re getting closer to seeing” — he made an oscillating, over-the-hill hand gesture as he sought the right words — “I don’t want to say the end, but the horizon,” De Niro said. “The beginning of the tip around and to the other side.”

Pacino said he saw these ideas more clearly after the movie was finished; to whatever extent they came through in his performance, he said, was the result of Scorsese’s direction and the movie’s long gestation process.

“I don’t think 10 years ago, he makes a film like this,” Pacino said. “He’s accessed — it’s a new word I’m using, but I like it — he’s accessed something I can’t even put my finger on, that I was surprised I was feeling. What is this that we’re in? What are we doing, the flailing around?”

It was easier for them to admit that they wanted their films to stand the test of time — “Of course you think about it,” De Niro said. “There are things that you do that you would like to be remembered for being special, even better than special.” (“The Irishman,” which has elicited some of the most enthusiastic reviews that Pacino, De Niro and Scorsese have ever received, would seem to fall within that category.)

But asking them to pass judgment on their own work felt crass. So instead, I wanted to know if they each had a favorite performance by the other.

De Niro answered right away: “I think of ‘Godfather’ I and II,” he said for Pacino.

Pacino, in turn, had an immediate choice for De Niro: “The one that dominates for me is ‘Raging Bull,’” Pacino said, but then he began to wonder if he was undercutting De Niro’s other accomplishments and started rattling off more movies.

“Of course there’s ‘Taxi Driver,’ ” he said absently. “I am thinking about your films, Bob. I’m going to have a Bob De Niro film festival.” While Pacino said this, an uncomfortable grimace began to cross De Niro’s face, as if simply hearing the names of his best-known movies was causing him discomfort.

Pacino had a sudden realization: “He won a couple Oscars,” he said, then asked, “You won the Oscar for — — ?” But there was no response, as De Niro seemed paralyzed with chagrin. Pacino answered himself: “Oh, ‘Godfather II’!” he exclaimed. “He was great in that, too.” (De Niro’s other Oscar was for “Raging Bull,” but no need to remind him.)

In “The Irishman,” Sheeran and Hoffa’s proximity eventually leads them to form a tender friendship — at least, before the blood-spattered climax — but De Niro and Pacino explained that the duties of promoting the movie did not quite replicate this relationship.

Even on a globe-trotting publicity tour like this one, with all the premieres and red carpets and after-parties, Pacino said, “we don’t even see each other that much.”

De Niro added, “Everybody does their thing, comes back, works, hangs out a little bit.” There was no need to check in, he said, because they’d eventually run into each other again.

In a voice that was teasing but also authentically affectionate, Pacino added, “It’s just nice to know that he’s there.”

This article originally appeared in

De Niro and Pacino Have Always Connected. Just Rarely On Screen.

LONDON — There’s no plaque to honor the encounter, and neither of its central participants can pinpoint the exact date it occurred, but somewhere on a stretch of 14th Street in Manhattan’s East Village is the spot where, in the late 1960s, two rookie actors named Robert De Niro and Al Pacino first crossed paths.

The subject of family permeates Douglas’ book, which Knopf will release Tuesday, and it remains prominent in his life, even after he served almost eight years in prison for possessing heroin and selling drugs.

He is the oldest son of Michael Douglas, the Academy Award-winning actor and producer, and a grandson of Kirk Douglas, the venerated “Spartacus” star. Although the thought of living up to either one of their reputations would seem paralyzing, Cameron Douglas made it clear in an interview last month that he did not expect anyone’s sympathy for squandering his privileged upbringing.

Nor did he blame the burden of his surname for sinking him into a mire of hard drugs, crime and punishment. “There was nothing anybody could do to get through to me at a certain point,” he said. His voice was tentative, and although he has been a free man since 2016, he spoke like someone who was still getting used to seeing daylight on a regular basis.

Douglas took a breath and continued, “All those years that the book is based on, all the pain and destruction that a lot of my behavior caused, is done. I can’t go back and undo that.” But maybe he can be useful to others by sharing his experiences and ruinous decisions, he said, “in the hopes that other people won’t have to make them.”

“Long Way Home” is Douglas’ unsparing account of how he pursued what he calls his “demented death wish,” chasing addictions to heroin and liquid cocaine, shaking off rehabs and forcible interventions, and nearly getting himself killed numerous times before turning to drug dealing to support his habit.

That’s Part One of the book. Part Two is the story of his arrest, indictment and incarceration, during which he was shuttled among a half-dozen federal penitentiaries and spent nearly two years in solitary confinement.

In telling his story, Douglas cannot avoid shining a spotlight on his illustrious if enigmatic family. With the same scrutiny he applies to himself, Douglas writes about his exasperated father, Michael; his press-shy mother, Diandra (who divorced Michael in 2000); and the combative generational dynamics that came with the Douglas name.

Even so, “Long Way Home” is a book that both Michael and Diandra Douglas said they understood their son needed to write, to make sense of his struggles and to keep him focused. And Cameron Douglas said he recognized the sacrifices his parents had made to let him do this.

“Allowing me to tell my story, which inevitably is connected to my family, it’s a very selfless act,” he said. “It’s like the ultimate way of saying I love you.”

Douglas is 40, with a quiff of reddish-brown hair and his father’s distinctively narrow facial features. On this day he was dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt that covered an assortment of tattoos across his chest, and he wore a wristband held together by a charm shaped like a ship’s anchor. “To me they represent the explorer — a man’s man,” he said. “Somebody that’s traveled and been through some stuff.”

As Douglas recounts in “Long Way Home,” he, too, has been to some places and seen some things: the lavish homes in New York and Santa Barbara, California, where he grew up; the elite private schools that admitted and later expelled him; the fountain where he crashed a sport utility vehicle after snorting crank and fleeing a Secret Service agent; the liquor stores and motels he stuck up as much for the illicit thrills as for the money; and the prison cells where he watched inmates fight each other with padlocks attached to shoelaces.

But the author is not the only one on display. He writes tenderly of how his parents met in 1977, when Michael was 32 and Diandra was 19, and how they were married eight weeks later. He describes a childhood populated by his father’s celebrity pals — Jack Nicholson, Pat Riley, Danny De Vito — and he has fond memories of seeing “beautiful grown-ups doing the things that beautiful grown-ups living lives of excess do.”

The euphoria soon dissipated. As Cameron Douglas writes in the book, his mother learned in the mid-1980s that his father was having “a fling” with Kathleen Turner, his “Romancing the Stone” co-star, and she threatened to end the marriage. In the early ’90s, after being caught in another act of infidelity, his father checked into an Arizona clinic for drug and alcohol treatment. Finally, in 1995, his mother hired a private investigator who returned with surveillance photos of his father in a hotel with another woman, and soon after his parents separated for good.

As he grew up, Cameron Douglas was acutely aware of the conflicts between his father and his grandfather: Michael was determined to stand outside his father’s shadow, and Kirk resented Michael for replacing him with Nicholson in the film version of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” — which Michael produced, and which Kirk had starred in during its original Broadway run.

Similar tensions emerged in Cameron Douglas’ relationship with Michael, and sometimes, as Cameron describes, they even fought physically. Cameron worshipped his father but resented having to share him with his many fans. As he writes in the book, “Every son admires his own father, but everyone in the world admired mine.”

Cameron Douglas said that estrangement worsened through his years of drug use, as he felt he saw his father pulling away. “A lot of the anger that I felt was really towards myself, because I was failing at making him proud of me,” he said.

Michael Douglas, whose half brother Eric died of an accidental drug and alcohol overdose in 2004, said in an interview that he had resigned himself to the belief that Cameron would meet a similar fate. “I thought I lost him a couple times over those years,” Michael Douglas said.

Even before Cameron was released from prison, his father encouraged him to write a memoir. “I thought in telling the story, if he was able to make a book deal, it might make him really try to understand what the hell happened and where it all went,” Michael Douglas said.

Cameron Douglas kept journals and wrote poetry during his incarceration, as a kind of mental regimen to get himself through each day. After his release, he began writing what would become “Long Way Home,” collaborating with Benjamin Wallace, the author and journalist.

Douglas said he recognized that “99.5 percent of the people don’t have the opportunities that I had when I came home,” and that the advantages he returned to obliged him to do something meaningful. The book gave him a sense of purpose as he readjusted to life on the outside. “It was something I was clinging to,” he said, “something solid that I could count on, that was productive and people seemed to be interested in.”

Throughout the book, Cameron Douglas tries to be candid about moments he cannot completely recall, where time and addiction have made his memories unreliable. (There are also the usual contradictions in the historical record: To this day, his mother and father continue to disagree about whether Cameron was allowed to see “Basic Instinct” when he was 13.)

Michael Douglas said that he read “a couple of drafts” of his son’s book and identified “a couple of places” where he “took issue of his interpretation of a moment here or there and said, ‘Excuse me, au contraire.’’’ Overall, he said, he was impressed. “It was not a book that was solely based on how his parents let him down. There’s always going to be an element of criticism, which I certainly accept and understand. But no, it wasn’t combative.”

He added that he and his family were accustomed to being on display. “You learn how to balance between that public exposure and maintaining your own privacy,” he said.

Diandra Douglas, a documentary film producer and philanthropist, said that it was difficult for her to read “Long Way Home,” having already lived through its harrowing details herself. “If I told you all the rehabs I’ve been to, and court hearings and visitations and driving 950 miles every other weekend to prisons, it’s really consumed, I would say, a large portion of my life for 24 years,” she said.

Although she said that Cameron had not specifically sought her approval before writing the memoir — “I think it was really Michael and Cameron that decided they were going to write this book” — she added, “Certainly, I’ve tried to be as supportive as possible.”

She read parts of an earlier manuscript but did not know “the ultimate outcome” of the book, she said. “Why, should I be worried?”

Even after being told that “Long Way Home” discussed intimate details of her marriage to Michael Douglas and its dissolution, Diandra Douglas expressed confidence that Cameron would strike the right tone. “As a human being, placing blame is very easy,” she said. “Taking responsibility for one’s actions is a lot tougher.”

Since his release, Cameron Douglas has moved back to Los Angeles, where he lives with his girlfriend and their daughter. He is pursuing an acting career, plugging away at some screenwriting projects, having occasional breakfasts with Kirk Douglas, who lives nearby, and volunteering at the Los Angeles Mission, a homeless shelter.

If his days feel overdetermined, it is a sensation that he much prefers to prison, where he had nothing but time and few opportunities to use it as he wished. “I used to say to myself, how does anybody get anything accomplished, out in the real world, in such a short amount of time?” he said. “I can barely get these four things done.”

Beyond the family he has built for himself, Douglas said, his principal responsibility was establishing a track record of diligence and consistency, so that his name will mean something aside from his past crimes.

He said he knew it would be a slow process, but he faced it with some optimism. “A lot of it is digging myself out of this hole and proving to people that I’m reliable,” he said. “Once some people start to see that, then the rest will follow suit.”

The Life of Cameron Douglas, From Privilege to Prison and Back

On the day in 2009 when Cameron Douglas was arrested at a New York hotel for possession of crystal meth, he was given a choice. As he recounts in his memoir, “Long Way Home,” a Drug Enforcement Administration agent told him he could either be taken out the front door, kicking and screaming, or, “for your family’s sake, we can take you out the back way, put you in a car.”

“I thought, my God, what a movie star, just so cool,” Rudd said a few weeks ago, still sounding awe-struck. His voice rose to an ironic timbre — “Leo’s no slouch either!” — before it returned to its usual, gentler register as he described how the Brad-gazing experience reminded him that audiences were never going to see him in quite the same way.

“I came to terms pretty early on,” he said, “that I was not going to be the guy up there that people would watch, going, ‘Yes! That’s who I want to be!’”

Rudd has been a film and TV star in his own right for more than 25 years now, from his earliest appearances in movies like “Clueless” to his first Netflix series, “Living With Yourself,” which debuts Oct. 18. Though some of us may feel that we’ve known him forever, he is, at 50, just reaching a new peak of fame, thanks in part to mammoth Marvel blockbusters like “Avengers: Endgame,” in which he plays the wisecracking superhero Ant-Man. He’s been filming a lead role in a new “Ghostbusters” movie that is planned to open next summer and which could elevate him even higher.

But his costumed adventuring is an outlier. Rudd has carved out his particular piece of pop-cultural turf by playing people who don’t necessarily get to swagger triumphantly, save the day or induce swooning.

OK, maybe just a little swooning. But the tough, quiet Brad Pitt roles are “not coming my way, and I’m not fighting for them,” Rudd said. “Because the truth is, I don’t quite relate to them in the same way that I relate to a guy who is mildly depressed or put-upon, and trying to fight his way out of this common situation.”

His wheelhouse, as Rudd understands it, is a certain sort of Everyman who, despite the good looks and charisma, is an avatar of averageness. In his most successful performances, he is besieged by quotidian problems; he is blessed with impeccable comic timing but at his funniest when he’s flailing and frustrated. Sometimes he can seem like two people at once.

It’s a dichotomy Rudd uses to full advantage in “Living With Yourself,” a comedy-drama with a science-fiction twist. In the series, he plays Miles, a dejected brand executive who has lost his passion for his work and his marriage. On a tip from a co-worker, he tries a mysterious spa treatment that he hopes will make him a new and better man — and which instead results in the creation of a clone (also played by Rudd) who is seemingly superior to Miles in every way.

With its dry, deadpan tone, “Living With Yourself” is a show that might not work half as well without Rudd’s inherent duality.

Of course he can handle the role of New Miles, the guy who seems always to have a spring in his step and a smile on his face. At an August breakfast in Manhattan’s West Village, Rudd was as charming as advertised. Clad inconspicuously in a baseball cap, T-shirt and shorts, still sporting his summer vacation beard, he was conscious of his celebrity without indulging in it, as when he spoke credibly about taking the subway like a civilian. (“If I talk to somebody, they’re like, ‘Why are you riding the subway?’ Because I need to get somewhere!”)

But “Living With Yourself” also allows Rudd to find the humor and the humanity in the old, original Miles: a man who was already struggling to fulfill his modest ambitions and must now contend with an unwanted doppelgänger, whose very existence creates standards he can’t live up to.

The truth is, there is a certain amount of the old Miles in Rudd, too: The actor knows how it feels to want the same seemingly fundamental things as everyone else — and to be misapprehended in those pursuits. He wants to feel that he is good at what he does and is expressing himself through it, but he also wants to hold on to a sense of commonality and privacy that he sometimes feels is slipping away.

When it comes to his work, Rudd said, “I don’t have any sort of grand statement to make, to anybody. I don’t want people to know that much about me, really. I don’t have much of an interest in being an open book.”

That doesn’t mean Rudd can’t appreciate the strange serendipity he has enjoyed in his career, and which has steered him to some indelible cultural moments, whether it’s the final season of “Friends” or the highest-grossing superhero movie in history. As he put it, “I’ve lived enough life to know that nothing you think is going to happen happens in the way you think it’s going to happen.”

No sooner had he finished saying this than a server came to our table and offered us a complimentary plate of breakfast pastries.

In some alternate universe, maybe Rudd could have just continued smirking and slappin’ da bass through character comedies like “Knocked Up” and “I Love You, Man.” But his trajectory took an unexpected turn about five years ago when he was asked to play Scott Lang, the hero of Marvel’s “Ant-Man,” which was to be directed by Edgar Wright.

Rudd was excited about the idea of working with Wright, whose action-comedies include “Shaun of the Dead” and “Baby Driver,” and Marvel thought Rudd could perfectly embody both the sweet and the unsavory sides of the title character.

“Scott Lang was a criminal — we meet him coming out of jail,” said Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios. “But also, he has a child, and you’d need somebody who could be funny and do action and who you would feel for as the father of this little girl.”

Rudd’s comedic chops were also an asset if Marvel ever hoped to fulfill its long-term vision of cramming all its heroes into one film. As Feige put it, “One day, this person might need to do a scene with Robert Downey Jr.”

When Wright left the film over creative differences and Peyton Reed took over as director, Rudd stayed on as an actor and a behind-the-scenes contributor of ideas and dialogue, eventually earning writing credits on “Ant-Man” and its sequel, “Ant-Man and the Wasp.”

Rudd also reprised his role in the battles royal of “Captain America: Civil War” and “Endgame.” But even as his stock soared, Rudd tried to remain down-to-earth. Feige recalled a trip that he and Rudd took to Hong Kong Disneyland earlier this year to open an attraction based on “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” during which the actor shared an email he received from his mother. She was reminding him to appreciate how special it was to be featured in a Disney ride.

“I thought, oh, that’s why Paul Rudd is Paul Rudd,” Feige said. “Because his mother is incredibly attentive and nice and emails her movie-star son these things in the morning.”

For all of his previous Ant-Man experiences, Rudd said he had never felt so acutely under the microscope as when the widely hyped, widely watched “Endgame” was released in April.

Throughout its opening weekend, Rudd said, “I noticed a heightened awareness. It seemed as if, no matter where I was, people had just seen the movie or they were going to it. Kids had seen it, and then parents of kids knew their kids had seen it.”

As he relayed this memory, Rudd started coughing and he paused to catch his breath. “I just choked on my own spit,” he said. “I swallowed wrong, and I wasn’t even swallowing. This is my allergic reaction to fame.”

The differences in his life since then, Rudd said, as his tone turned arch again, have “been noticeable, but you adjust — and I adjust by staying in my house and peeing in bottles like Howard Hughes.”

He didn’t seem to find as much humor, however, in the inventory of ostensibly well-intended internet posts and memes that comment on his seemingly eternal youth and celebrate him for apparently never aging over the course of his career.

Rudd said he was not on any social media, but when I asked if he knew about this strain of online commentary, he dryly answered, “I’m aware.” He continued: “It’s certainly nicer than hearing, God, that guy looks like (expletive). I don’t know what to say about any of this — there’s nothing really to say about it.”

One might assume that Rudd chose to do “Living With Yourself” as an attempt to get back to his comic roots, to show that he encompasses more than his internet caricature or to stake his claim in the streaming television gold rush. But as it happens, Rudd isn’t a rabid consumer of serialized TV — “I haven’t seen ‘Fleabag,’” he said in our conversation, “but I know I love it.” (He has since seen two episodes, he said by text.) He just happened to have read and liked the scripts.

“Living With Yourself” was created and written by Timothy Greenberg, a former executive producer for “The Daily Show.” Greenberg, who wrote all of the show’s first season, drew his inspirations from various sources, including a persistent childhood nightmare about meeting his exact double, as well as a frequent argument he had with wife, who wondered why he was sometimes very sociable and other times sullen and solitary.

“She would say, ‘Why can’t you just be the happy you?’” he recalled. “And I was like, ‘Who doesn’t want to turn on a switch and always be the best version of themselves?’ But we can’t do that.” (He added that he and his wife were “very happily married” and “beyond this now.”)

Rudd added many of his own ideas to the series. He wanted the protagonist’s name changed from George to Miles (he felt he’d played too many Georges in other movies); he had specific jokes written for his characters; and he even had his own strategy for playing Old Miles and New Miles in scenes where they appeared opposite each other.

(As Rudd explained, he first made audio recordings of his dialogue, then filmed his scenes wearing an electronic earpiece that played the recording back to him. “It became like choreography,” he said. “I would hear the words and remember my actions, and I would act like I was looking at myself.”)

Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (“Little Miss Sunshine”), the husband-and-wife filmmakers who directed all eight episodes of “Living With Yourself,” said that Rudd’s input had been welcome and offered in the right spirit.

They added that his affability was crucial to helping viewers navigate the opening minutes of “Living With Yourself,” which focuses on the pitiable, rundown Old Miles.

“That is the luxury of having an actor who has a body of work and who brings so much of themselves to the screen,” Dayton said. “You aren’t starting at zero. When you see Paul in the first frame, you already know a lot.”

Faris said that the old Miles character “is kind of unleavened, but he helps you get through the first part of this, because you know it’s Paul — you know there’s going to be more than just this guy who’s down in the dumps.”

A lifetime in show business has made Rudd protective, not only of himself but also of his family: a wife and their two children, whom he discussed only from the standpoint of his angst about raising them in a metropolis like New York City.

Now his film work also requires a level of secrecy that he is unaccustomed to, and he worried that even my describing the contents of his breakfast would give away whether he was or was not in training for another “Ant-Man” movie. “Feel free to not put in the fact that I’m eating bacon,” he said. “Eggs would be fine.”

(Asked what further plans Marvel had for Rudd and his character, Feige, the Marvel Studios president, said: “The chess pieces were arranged very purposefully after ‘Endgame.’ Those that are off the board are off, and those that are still on, you never know.”)

Rudd had to be cautious, too, when talking about his “Ghostbusters” movie, which is directed by Jason Reitman and will reportedly feature appearances from founding “Ghostbusters” cast members like Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd.

“I grew up watching that movie,” Rudd said of the original “Ghostbusters,” “and this happened to be one where it completely works on its own. You don’t want to do it just because it’s part of a larger thing, but there is the added bonus of being part of something that has a real place in culture.”

But he would not say what it was like to strap on a proton pack for the first time, or if he even wields one in the film.

“It remains to be seen what I strap on,” Rudd said. “I’m not giving you anything.”

Rudd made “Living With Yourself” partly to show that inadequate people can be redeemed, he said, but any inquiries into his own shortcomings were gently deflected with humor. Could he really be flawed himself? “No, that’s the crazy thing!” he said with exaggerated amazement. “That’s what makes it really hard to play these parts. I interviewed a lot of people who do have flaws. I have hours of tapes, filled up notebooks.”

Maybe Rudd wouldn’t reveal, in that setting, what exactly made him as imperfect as everyone else. But the point of a show like “Living With Yourself” is that we all have these imperfections — even those of us who outwardly appear perfect — and there is comfort in this universal truth.

“There are some days where we really feel we’re on our game,” he said. “We’re sharp. We feel comfortable and relaxed. We feel good about how we look, or we feel comfortable about the day. And then there are the other six days of the week.”

Realizing, perhaps, that he was on the verge of saying something too straightforwardly sincere, Rudd put a hand to his heart and began to rhapsodize.

“I think Billy Joel put it best in ‘Keeping the Faith’ when he said the good old days weren’t always good, and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems,” he said.

He held up his coffee mug and announced: “To William H. Joel. I don’t know if H is his middle initial, but for the purposes of this toast, it is.”

For the record, Billy Joel’s middle name is Martin, but we’ll let Rudd have this one.

Like many other moviegoers, Paul Rudd emerged from “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” thinking a lot about Brad Pitt. Having spent a couple of hours this summer in a darkened theater, where he watched the effortlessly self-assured Pitt spar with Bruce Lee, pal around with Leonardo DiCaprio and strip off his shirt to fix a television antenna, Rudd left feeling slightly bedazzled and slightly intimidated, but also feeling that his own place in the cultural hierarchy had been clarified.

Paul Rudd, the One-Man Double Act

But the woman who greeted me from atop a staircase, in the boxy residence she calls her “peaceful Zen treehouse,” and asked if I was chilly or needed a jacket, was not the steely star whose movies, like “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “Ghost” and “A Few Good Men,” helped define the 1980s and ’90s. She was not the stylized deity venerated on magazine covers, not the inadvertent pioneer for pay equity in her industry, nor the walled-off enigma who, by her own design, resisted most efforts to reveal the authentic person behind the adamantine roles she played.

Dressed in a long-sleeve T-shirt, moccasin boots and a pair of prescription glasses with transition lenses, Moore sat cross-legged on the floor of her living room that late August morning and told me the story of her life.

It is an exercise that she has already undertaken in a memoir, “Inside Out,” which Harper will release Sept. 24. The book is a candid personal narrative, in which Moore fills in not only the details surrounding the most visible parts of her history — her Hollywood career and her much scrutinized marriages to actors Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutcher — but the portions of her life that she once fought to protect, including the confusing and all-too-abrupt childhood that preceded her choppy show-business ascent, and a more recent relapse into substance abuse that nearly tore apart her family.

As she writes in a typically unsparing self-assessment, “if you carry a well of shame and unresolved trauma inside of you, no amount of money, no measure of success or celebrity, can fill it.”

With the publication of “Inside Out” approaching, Moore told me she was both eager and anxious, at the age of 56, to finally let audiences see her as she sees herself, without any barriers or artifices.

“It’s exciting, and yet I feel very vulnerable,” she said, twisting a finger through her long, dark hair. “There is no cover of a character. It’s not somebody else’s interpretation of me.”

If it is surprising to see such self-revelation from any prominent Hollywood actress — let alone one with Moore’s particular accomplishments and setbacks, and who admits to a reputation for reticence — she said that writing the memoir was a necessary part of a longer process of rediscovering herself. “I had to figure out why to do this, because my own success didn’t drive me,” she said.

And if the whole endeavor is construed as a bid for more movie roles or just to be back in the limelight, so be it. “It’s more of an awakening than a comeback,” she said.

‘I was just the instrument’

As Moore recounts in “Inside Out,” her upbringing was defined by constant motion, with stops in New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Washington state before her family landed in Southern California. Along the way her father, Danny Guynes, enlisted her to help him prevent her mother, Ginny, from following through on one of her frequent suicide attempts, and after they separated young Demi learned that Danny was not actually her biological father.

She writes about being raped at 15 and moving out of her mother’s home to live with a guitarist a day after her 16th birthday. Two years later, she married rock musician Freddy Moore, a union that she says she quickly sabotaged with her infidelity.

Her acting career, meanwhile, was exploding, as she parlayed a gig on “General Hospital” into lead roles in films like “Blame It on Rio” and “About Last Night...” If those earliest characters were often lust objects or required her to appear unclothed, Moore now says her jumbled feelings about desire and sexuality likely drew her to them. “When I was younger, I was obligated to be of service,” she told me. “I wouldn’t be loved if I wasn’t — if I didn’t give of myself. My value was tied into my body.” She abused alcohol and cocaine, binge-ate and obsessed over her weight.

Following a called-off wedding to Emilio Estevez, Moore married Willis, the taciturn action star, and they had three daughters, Rumer, Scout and Tallulah. Moore was starring in the most successful films of her career, including “Ghost” (which took in more than $217 million at the U.S. box office), “A Few Good Men” ($141 million) and “Indecent Proposal” ($106 million).

But just as quickly, the wheels came off: Moore writes that Willis was ambivalent about her work, which he felt took time away from their family, and he told her he was unsure if he wanted to be married. (A spokeswoman for Willis said he wasn’t available for comment.) When Moore started earning multimillion-dollar salaries, including a reported $12.5 million for “Striptease,” she was portrayed in the news media as greedy and given the derisive nickname “Gimme Moore.”

Today, Moore sees herself as the scapegoat of an entertainment industry that could not countenance its female stars being paid as much as its male leads (at a time when Willis was earning as much if not more for his films). To have been a trailblazer in this way, she said, “was an honor, and with that came a lot of negativity and a lot of judgment towards me, which I’m happy to have held if it made a difference.”

After a long pause she answered, “I do, actually. I know that it really resonated.” But, she added, “It’s not about me doing it. I was just the instrument by which it was done. Clearly it didn’t do enough because we’re still, this many years later, dealing with it.”

‘Women didn’t naturally fit into the system’

No setback deflated Moore quite like “G.I. Jane,” the Ridley Scott action movie for which Moore underwent weeks of training and a grueling shoot to play a fictional character attempting to become the first woman to complete Navy Seal training. That film was criticized by military veterans for inaccuracies and savaged by reviewers, ending up a box-office disappointment.

“They weren’t going to let me win,” she said. “That, to the little girl in me — that was crushing.”

Amid her divorce from Willis and her mother’s death from cancer, Moore stepped back from her acting work to focus on raising her daughters. Although she continued to produce films like the “Austin Powers” series, she acted only occasionally, in roles like the villain of “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.” She was in her early 40s and wondering if Hollywood had no more use for her.

“They’d say they don’t really know what to do with you, where to place you,” she said. “I was like, oh, well is that supposed to flatter me?”

Moore never spoke with bitterness when she discussed these experiences; if anything, she was soft-spoken and un-self-consciously goofy. At the start of our conversation she swigged on Starbucks and switched midway to alternating between sips of Red Bull and drags from a caffeine vape pen. She has surrounded herself in her home with small, affectionate dogs with names like Merple, Diego and Sousci Tunia, and she also collects taxidermy — like the baby zebra near her fireplace — of animals that she said “have had unfortunate early passings.” (She said she also had “a stillborn deer” in her home in Hailey, Idaho.)

To a slightly younger generation of film actresses, Moore is regarded as a both a tough-as-nails renegade and a nurturer. “She became a movie star in this time where women didn’t naturally fit into the system,” said Gwyneth Paltrow, who has become a friend of Moore’s. “She was really the first person who fought for pay equality and got it, and really suffered a backlash from it. We all certainly benefited from her.”

But before Moore could see her own self-worth she had to withstand another set of trials that eventually led to the creation of “Inside Out.” In 2003, she started dating Kutcher, disregarding the rubbernecking that their 15-year age gap invited and feeling, as she writes, that she was enjoying “a do-over, like I could just go back in time and experience what it was like to be young, with him — much more so than I’d ever been able to experience it when I was actually in my 20s.”

She became pregnant soon after, with a girl who she intended to name Chaplin Ray, but Moore lost the child about six months into the pregnancy. She had started drinking again and blamed herself for the loss. Moore and Kutcher married in 2005 and pursued fertility treatments in hopes of getting pregnant again. But her drinking worsened, and she started abusing Vicodin, all before learning that Kutcher had cheated on her. (They separated in 2011 and divorced two years later; his spokeswoman didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

Things somehow got worse still. While partying with Rumer in 2012, Moore suffered a seizure after smoking synthetic cannabis and inhaling nitrous oxide. Her hedonistic behavior had already alienated Scout and Tallulah, and now all three of her daughters were shunning her.

At the time, Moore had signed with Harper to write a memoir, one that she intended to be about the mothers and daughters in her family. But those plans would have to wait: “Part of my life was clearly unraveling,” she told me.

“I had no career,” she said. “No relationship.” And then her health began to deteriorate, as even basic tasks like reading and watching TV became incapacitating. Moore was experiencing autoimmune and digestive problems and, while she was circumspect about telling me the exact diagnosis she received, she said, “Something was going on, including my organs slowly shutting down,” adding that “the root was a major heavy viral load.”

Recovery, reconciliation, ‘it’s all been in alignment’

Little by little, Moore pieced things back together. She went to a rehab program for trauma, codependency and substance abuse and worked with a doctor specializing in integrative medicine to rectify her health problems. Gradually she began to reconcile with her daughters and, about two years ago, got serious about the writing of “Inside Out,” which she accomplished with a co-author, Ariel Levy, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a memoirist as well.

At the outset of their collaboration, Levy encouraged Moore not to censor herself but found that she did not need much reassurance in this area. “Let’s just get it out,” Levy said she told Moore, “and in the end, anything that you’re like, ‘That’s actually too private,’ we’ll take it out. And that step kind of never happened.”

Paltrow, in particular, credited the memoir with helping to reduce Moore’s health problems by unburdening her of the psychic baggage she’d been carrying. As women, Paltrow said, “We think we just have to get through everything and bear the burden for everyone in our family.”

Moore’s book, she said, went hand-in-hand with “her healing journey — physically, mentally, emotionally. It’s no accident that it’s all been in alignment and all happened at the same time.”

Moore said she had little concern that anything she wrote would cost her any standing in her industry. “There’s nothing I have to protect,” she said. “Really.”

She also felt strongly that she had the right to share stories that involved her famous ex-husbands if these episodes were principally about her, and she was confident that her portrayals of them did not make them into villains or her into a victim.

“I’m definitely not interested in blaming anyone,” Moore said. “It’s a waste of energy.”

She thought further on this. She started to say, “I hope that everyone that’s in the book feels like it’s — ” She paused, then added, “I don’t know what I hope they feel.” With a chuckle, she said, “Good, not bad.”

‘Soul-centered living,’ and working

For Moore’s daughters, “Inside Out” is a more fraught project. Each said they were given the opportunity to review a copy of the manuscript and ask for changes, although none of them requested revisions.

Scout Willis told me she was proud of her mother for “doing the internal work that she didn’t have the time to do, for a long time, because she was just in survival mode.” Writing the memoir, Scout said, “really denotes a certain amount of safety and comfort with herself.”

At the same time, she said the book resurfaced uncomfortable memories for her and her sisters, who have dealt with substance abuse and body-image issues of their own.

“It’s challenging because she’s making this amazing effort to put out the most vulnerable moments of her life,” Scout said. “It just happens that it also coincides with some of the most challenging and traumatic times of mine.”

Rumer Willis said the book was an opportunity to learn her mother’s history, some of which Moore had hinted at over the years but never told them in this much detail.

“We grow up thinking that our parents are these immovable gods of Olympus,” Rumer said. “Obviously, as we grow older, we start to realize how much our parents are just people.”

Moore said she has maintained her sobriety and that she, Rumer and Scout are seven months into a 10-month course on spiritual psychology, which she said teaches “soul-centered living.” (Moore is no longer involved with kabbalah studies — “not the human organization, which is human, so it’s imperfect,” although she said its teachings provided her with “a lot of wisdom that I still really value.”)

She continues to act in ensemble roles that she hopes will take her outside her comfort zones: She is among the cast members of a USA Network adaptation of “Brave New World” and plays an obnoxious executive in the dark comedy “Corporate Animals,” a part originally intended for Sharon Stone. And she is still developing material for herself, mentioning that a project about Isabella Goodwin, the first female police detective in New York City, could provide “a pretty spectacular character.”

Moore has already been asked if she wrote “Inside Out” for the money, and before I could ask her again, she answered herself: “Uh, definitely not,” she said with a knowing laugh. “Because there’s a lot of easier ways to do that.”

But the idea that “Inside Out” might be perceived as a work of image management — an effort on Moore’s part to replace the version of herself that people perceive with the one she wants to be seen as, or provide one where none currently exists — is one that she wholeheartedly embraced. “I would say, yeah,” she replied. “Great! Why not?”

“Did you know me before?” she asked, already expecting that I would answer no. “Well, there you go,” she said. “That’s what I would say.”

LOS ANGELES — A few days after I visited Demi Moore in her home high above Beverly Hills, her daughter Tallulah Willis told me, “My mom was not raised, she was forged.”

Demi Moore Lets Her Guard Down

And he’s about to appear in one of the biggest films of his career, “It Chapter Two,” playing the adult version of Richie Tozier, the trash-talking teenager (played by Finn Wolfhard in the original 2017 film) who is part of a group of friends who must regularly confront a murderous incarnation of evil in a Maine town. The sequel, which also stars Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy, is directed by Andy Muschietti and will be released Friday.

Yet, in a late August interview at an organic cafe in Pacific Palisades, Hader, 41, was not exactly in a celebratory mood. He has a dry, deadpan manner, and he was already worried about how his performance in “It Chapter Two” would be measured against the work of his co-stars. Rather than exulting in the Emmy Award he won for acting in the first season of “Barry” or the 17 nominations the show recently received for its second season, he was stressing about the work that lay ahead in Season 3.

Putting aside his own day-to-day anxieties, Hader talked about the bigger fears he was forced to confront as an actor, artist and human being on “It Chapter Two” and “Barry.” These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Q: When we spoke in 2018, before the debut of “Barry,” would you say you felt some uncertainty about whether the show would succeed?

A: Oh my God, more than uncertainty. I was terrified. I’ve never had my own thing that wasn’t associated with other friends from “SNL,” and I was on the poster and the lead character. If it didn’t work, it’s all me.

LOS ANGELES — There would seem to be far worse outcomes in life than growing up to be Bill Hader. He’s a beloved former cast member of “Saturday Night Live,” as well as the co-creator and star of the dark HBO comedy “Barry,” about a hit man who’s trying to go incognito in an acting class.

Dave Itzkoff

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