The Subject Of A Long-Running Paul Rudd Joke Features A Young Jennifer Aniston

Paul Rudd had a very peculiar, and stringently consistent joke that he loved to play on talk show host Conan O’Brien. Rudd has often appeared on O’Brien’s many shows — from “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” and “Conan,” to “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” — usually to promote and upcoming TV show or movie that he was involved with. As the talk show format dictates, visiting guest stars would introduce and present a clip of the films they were promoting, usually only about 15 to 30 seconds long. Rudd, imp that he is, would earnestly introduce his clip to O’Brien, but then show a 28-second portion of Stewart Raffill’s 1988 film “Mac and Me.”

The clip depicted the film’s wheelchair-using protagonist Eric (Jade Calegory) uncontrollably rolling down a wooded hill. His friend (Lauren Stanley) yells after him, but Eric’s descent cannot be controlled. At the bottom of the hill, Eric plummets off the edge of a cliff, and falls 30 feet into a body of water. Right when he splashes down, the film’s titular alien, Mac, pops up in the middle of the frame. Mac is played by a very odd-looking puppet, resembling a hairless, elderly mogwai. The clip is violent, weird, and hilarious. Rudd has shown it to Conan dozens of times in the last few decades. They would always get a good laugh out of it.

“Mac and Me,” for those unfamiliar, was a brazen knockoff of Steven Spielberg’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” It was about a young boy with a single mom who befriends a weird-looking space visitor, just like “E.T.,” and featured a lot of parallel scenes. In “E.T.,” the young Elliott coaxes the space creature out of hiding with Reese’s Pieces. In “Mac and Me,” it’s a Coca-Cola. Both creatures also went by abbreviated names. E.T. was short for extra-terrestrial, of course, while Mac was an abbreviation of Mysterious Alien Creature.

Fun trivia: Jennifer Aniston was in “Mac and Me.” She was only a featured extra in a later scene, but one can clearly see her in the background, watching some break-dancers in a McDonald’s

Read more: 10 Completed Movies That Were Never Released

Jennifer Aniston started her career as a background extra in Mac and Me

To be clear, Aniston is not in the cliff scene that Paul Rudd inflicted on Conan O’Brien. She was in a dance scene partway through the film, wherein young breakdancers were putting on a show at a McDonald’s. One needs to have quick eyes to see her, but she is recognizable. She’s the tall one in the white shoes. She was not one of the dancers. It was the actress’ first role, and she wasn’t credited. Look closely at the crowd scenes, and one might also make out Nikki Cox, the future star of “Unhappily Ever After.” In a weird coincidence, Aniston and Rudd would work together eventually, playing the co-leads in Nicholas Hytner’s 1998 queer romance “The Object of My Affection.” They also reunited for the 2012 comedy “Wanderlust.”

Aniston, like so many performers before her, spent many years snatching small acting gigs and paying her dues. After her day job on “Mac and Me,” she would land a recurring role in the obscure 1990 sitcom “Molloy” starring Mayim Bialik. The same year, she was one of the series regulars on the equally obscure “Ferris Bueller” sitcom spin-off. Some would consider her leading role in the 1993 horror film “Leprechaun” to be her big break, as it was a modest hit, even if it was critically derided. That same year, Aniston plied her comedy chops to an extreme degree in the great and ultra-violent sketch comedy series “The Edge,” co-created by Julie Brown. In 1994, however, she was cast as Rachel in the hit sitcom “Friends,” and became a world-recognized star — not to mention a multimillionaire — over the course of that show’s 10 seasons. She dated Brad Pitt, got sponsorships, and graced magazine covers.

So remember, kids, being an extra in that stupid-ass alien movie isn’t a waste of time. Many great actors and movie stars got their start in a similar way.

All that said, I should pause to further explain “Mac and Me.”

What the heck is Mac and Me?

It should be noted that “Mac” wasn’t just an acronym for Mysterious Alien Creature, but a very deliberate tie-in to McDonald’s. Product placement is not just prevalent in “Mac and Me,” but its raison d’être. The film was conceived by an advertising executive named R.J. Louis who worked on campaigns for McDonald’s, and who figured that McDonald’s mascot, Ronald McDonald, was better known than even Mickey Mouse. Simultaneously, Louis figured that “E.T.” was getting long in the tooth, and that kids of the late 1980s would want their own version of the character. He combined both of these ideas in “Mac and Me,” a prolonged commercial for McDonald’s wearing the skin of an E.T. knockoff. Ronald McDonald not only appears in the movie, but the mascot also narrated the film’s teasers.

Rumors circulated for years that McDonald’s partially funded the film, but that’s not quite true. One of the main investors was Golden State Foods, one of McDonald’s food distributors, but the McDonald’s company itself didn’t invest in “Mac and Me.”

Stewart Raffill, the director, had previously made stylish and exciting comedies, action pictures, and sci-fi films. He made “High Risk,” “The Philadelphia Experiment,” and “The Ice Pirates.” /Film once interviewed Raffill, and it turns out that R.J. Louis hired him before there was a script. In Raffill’s words:

“I was hired out of the blue. And the producer asked me to come down to the office. So I did and he had a whole crew there, a whole crew on the payroll. It was amazing. […] He had everybody already hired and I said, ‘Well, what’s the script?’ And he said, ‘We don’t have a script. I don’t like the script. You have to write the script. You’re gonna have to write it quickly so prep the movie and write the script on the weekends.'”

That explains a lot. “Mac and Me” is a cult sensation, partially because of Rudd, but also because of its weirdness. It’s something to behold.

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Read the original article on SlashFilm.