Rudd has since done the bit every time he’s appeared on O’Brien’s various talk shows over the years, always promising to not play Mac and Me and yet trolling the audience (and O’Brien) every time.
When Rudd appeared as a guest on Late Night to promote the show, he offered to play an exclusive clip from the series finale, only to prank the audience with the Mac and Me video. The bit dates all the way back to 2004, when O’Brien was hosting Late Night With Conan O’Brien on NBC and Rudd had just finished taping the highly anticipated final episode of Friends. Sure enough, the clip is instead a scene from the 1988 film Mac and Me - a poorly-received E.T. knock-off - where the wheelchair-bound character played by Jade Calegory rolls off a cliff into a lake as the alien MAC looks on. In the middle of the interview, Rudd showed up from behind the curtain and told O’Brien that he had a clip from the sketch’s dress rehearsal. O’Brien was interviewing Bill Hader on the Monday night show when the conversation turned to a never-aired Saturday Night Live sketch that Hader did with Rudd.
“Whoever dies first, you have to do that at the other one’s funeral,” Andy Richter says off-screen.Conan O’Brien’s TBS talk show Conan is coming to an end this week, and it wouldn’t be a proper send-off without a final rendition of what is arguably the show’s most iconic bit: Paul Rudd’s Mac and Me prank.
But this time, O’Brien is cheering along with the audience. Download and install Brother iPrint&Scan - Windows or Macintosh computer Brother iPrint&Scan for PC/Mac provides access toThis Brother iPrint & Scan app (version 8. Conan’s audience, who are more than aware of Rudd’s gag, cheered so loudly you’d think that Rudd was showing something from a new Marvel movie. And once again, Lucy pulled the football away at the last minute (aka showed the Mac and Me clip instead). Once again, Conan’s Lucy (Rudd) placed the football (the terrible SNL sketch) out for Charlie Brown (O’Brien) to kick. After explaining what went wrong and that the sketch was filmed despite never airing on SNL itself, Rudd asked if people wanted to see the cut sketch for themselves. Instead, he crashed O’Brien’s interview with Bill Hader as Hader discussed an SNL sketch he and Rudd performed that was cut for being terrible. In O’Brien’s final week, Rudd wasn’t scheduled to be interviewed.
“‘The only way they would let me show that clip is if that now I show a clip from the real movie so they’re like, OK, fine’…When I did Ant-Man, I actually had him working and handed him the clip. “It’s now gone onto such crazy lengths where I have shown the clip and then it cuts back and I said, ‘Look, the studio got very upset when I did that, they take clips very seriously,’” Rudd explained to Chris Evans in 2016. There’s even a compilation of Rudd’s earlier hits on YouTube, and you only need to search “Paul Rudd Mac and Me” on YouTube to discover several more iterations of it with each one, O’Brien’s exasperation becomes all the more entertaining as he’s seemingly the only person who believes Rudd will actually play the clip he promised. No matter what Rudd was promoting, whether it was an Ant-Man movie, Anchorman 2. In the scene Rudd brings with him (and it’s the same exact scene every time), a young boy rolls off a cliff and into a lake in his wheelchair as the alien character watches it happen with widened eyes. rip-off that’s widely considered to be one of the worst films ever made. Only, instead of that clip, Rudd would show O’Brien a clip from Mac and Me, the 1988 E.T.
For the past 17 years, starting with an interview promoting the Friends series finale in 2004, whenever Rudd has appeared on one of O’Brien’s TV shows, Rudd promised to show him and the audience an exclusive clip from whatever he happened to be promoting at the time. Rudd is known for many things- Ant-Man, playing the heartthrob in Clueless, his apparent lack of aging, and being a premiere meme-but on Conan and O’Brien’s other late-night shows over the years, Rudd is a massive troll.
Conan O’Brien is ending his long-running late-night show on TBS on June 24, but before O’Brien takes his final bow, Paul Rudd couldn’t resist pulling the rug from him one last time.