‘Avengers: Endgame’ Directors Call Out Paul Rudd Over Spoiler Incident

Avengers: Endgame directors Anthony and Joe Russo had an angry word for Ant-Man star Paul Rudd [...]

By Cameron Bonomolo

Avengers: Endgame directors Anthony and Joe Russo had an angry word for Ant-Man star Paul Rudd after his failed attempt to dupe the directors into revealing spoilers.

"RUUUUUDDDDD!!!," reads a tweet shared by the Russo brothers' Twitter account when sharing the skit, which sees Rudd meet with the directors in an attempt to learn what happens and who dies in the top-secret Endgame.

"I'm tired of all this secretive, hush-hush nonsense," Rudd says before he's interrupted by the directing duo. "I'll tell you what I want, I want to know whether or not I live or die in Endgame."

When pressed to spill spoilers, Joe says Rudd "got a script," with notoriously loose-lipped Hulk star Mark Ruffalo cited as the sole Avengers star not in the loop.

"No ending! Everyone knows Ruffalo gets a fake script, he's always ruining things," Rudd says. "But I don't know, I never got an ending."

"Don't be offended, it was just for your safety," Anthony says. Adds Joe, "If you don't know, then you can't slip up in an interview."

As Anthony begins to tell Rudd Endgame's biggest secrets, Joe discovers the hidden camera. "His phone is on," Joe says. "Ruffalo left his phone," fibs Rudd, reaching for the device as the recording is cut short.

The joke video comes after the Russos "fired" Ruffalo in late 2018 as part of a running gag. The star — who once let slip a major Avengers: Infinity War spoiler and accidentally live-streamed a portion of Thor: Ragnarok ahead of its debut — was jokingly fired on Twitter after he unleashed a censored parade of Endgame spoilers during an October appearance on The Tonight Show.

"It is very difficult when your job is to sort of personalize these stories, personalize these characters, and sort of bring all your creative, collaborative energy to a process that lasts many, many months — sometimes more than a year — it's a big part of your life," Anthony Russo said during an Infinity War screening and Q&A in December when explaining the share-as-little-as-possible policy, which means withholding full Avengers scripts from nearly their entire cast.

"So it's very hard not to talk about this stuff, because you live with it for so long and you live with it so deeply. We have developed a process where you take pressure off of people by letting them know less. It's less responsibility they have to edit themselves, so we've developed an elaborate process by which we try to only let people know what they absolutely need to know. And it makes a little bit easier for them to edit themselves."

Avengers: Endgame opens April 26.

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