Olivia Colman was not impressed with her “really good mate” Paul Rudd when she found out he’d come to the UK without letting her know beforehand – so decided to get her own back.
During Friday’s edition of the Radio 1 breakfast show, the Oscar winner prank-called Paul during an “Agony Aunt-Man” phone-in, during which he’d been giving listeners advice.
Adopting a fake Welsh accent to disguise her face, she asked: “What would you do if you had a really good mate… like for over 20 years… and then this friend… he doesn’t live in England, but he’s come to England, and he hasn’t told you about it?”
“And then not only has he not told you about it, he’s come onto a radio show?”
“Oh my god,” Paul replied, as the true identity of the caller began to sink in.
“What would you do?” the former The Crown actor continued. “Would you be offended?”
He then joked, in his typically chipper fashion: “Personally, if it’s me, absolutely not. I tend to give everybody the benefit of the doubt.”
After revealing herself, Olivia revealed she and the Marvel star “really go back”, after appearing in a play together around 20 years ago.
“Paul used to come and stay on the floor of our rubbish flat in South London and come for Sunday lunch and things and we had a lovely [time],” she recalled. “Paul was properly in the play, I had about two lines.”
Revealing how her impromptu prank came to pass, Olivia explained: “I was listening to the breakfast show – as I always do because I love you Greg James – and I heard that Paul Rudd was coming on to do Agony Aunt-Man. And I went ‘what?’
“And so I emailed Greg and said, ‘would it be alright to do a prank on Paul?’. And he said ‘hell yeah’.”
Paul is currently in the UK to promote his new movie Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania, which is his third film at the helm of the Ant-Man franchise.
He’s also played the character in Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Endgame.