Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
More On:
Living with Yourself
Living with Yourself is one of the most entertaining and surprising shows on Netflix right now, and so it makes sense that this show would pull off such a thrilling 15-second cameo as well. Spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn’t made it about halfway through the first episode.
You should know that I say this as a New York Giants fan, but this guest appearance was simply too good. As Miles (Paul Rudd) debates if he should go through with an experimental spa treatment, he sees a handsome gent emerge from the establishment. He gives him a second look and realizes, yep, that’s New England Patriot Tom Brady. “First time?” Brady asks the nearly speechless Miles. “Uh huh. You?” he responds. Brady shakes his head and replies, “Six.” Yes, that would be one for each Super Bowl ring in his possession. He then gets into a black car with tinted windows and drives off as the updated and upgraded version of himself, which is all Miles needs to see for his own encouragement to go through with it.
“I actually played that part,” co-star Aisling Bea joked this week when Decider spoke to the cast and crew of the series. Living with Yourself creator Timothy Greenberg confirmed that yes, Tom Brady was the first choice for the cameo, and no, there was no backup. “We had some ideas but it was like Tom Brady and then everybody else. We spent a lot of time over many years and months trying to figure out what the backup would be.”
“Also he is an American star, one of the few American footballers who reads in Europe,” Bea pointed out of the overseas appeal. “Some people don’t know who he is, but most people do know Tom Brady and Giselle Bundchen,” she explained, agreeing he was the perfect person to appear as it served as ” a reference to the holy grail of physical perfection.” They tossed around a couple of names of international soccer stars, but there was just one guy for the job.
“He was a great sport,” Greenberg said of Brady. “I just don’t know why he did it.” But Bea had her own suspicions as to why he signed on for the brief role. “So many people are fans of Paul Rudd,” she said. “There are loads of people, like a lot of footballers don’t have any active lives outside of sports, so they watch a lot of comedy.”
“I think he might’ve just been a Paul Rudd fan,” Greenberg agreed.
And he wasn’t alone. While Bea quite enjoyed their little on-set family, which included herself and Rudd, Greenberg, and co-directors Valerie Farris and Jonathan Dayton, she was often reminded of her co-star’s popularity when the group would leave the set and “you’d go somewhere with Paul and it’d be like “PAUL!” And now that Living with Yourself is available on Netflix, viewers have the chance to watch TWO Pauls, which somehow is still not enough.
