Casting directors typecast everyone. Even Paul Rudd.

Everyone in this business gets typecast, even Paul Rudd in his early days. Casting directors and agents put you in a box and its incredibly difficult to get out of it.

Here’s how Paul Rudd worked his way out of that box.

“Paul is a good-looking guy,” says Hamburg. “I’m man enough to say that. But I think that for the early part of his career, people didn’t realize he was also really funny.”

Casting directors didn’t realize that. They saw cheekbones, they thought “love interest.”

Rudd’s first big break came in 1995, a few years after he moved to New York (he’d grown up in a Kansas City suburb and studied theater at the University of Kansas), when he was cast as Alicia Silverstone’s perfectly sweet ex-stepbrother in “Clueless.”

After that he started popping up everywhere: as Leonardo DiCaprio’s perfectly sweet competition in “Romeo + Juliet,” as Jennifer Aniston’s perfectly sweet gay love interest in “The Object of My Affection.” On the release of that movie, one gaga reviewer declared, “Already a fringe teen dream,” Rudd “could now claim universal pin-up status.”

“That’s definitely the direction that the Hollywood machine was trying to push him in,” says writer and director David Wain, who has known Rudd for a decade and worked with him on several projects, including “Role Models.” “But he’s always been this hyper-smart, hysterically funny guy. He’s like Paul Newman, but then he’s got this absurdist sense of humor.”

Still, the machine might have succeeded, except that Rudd got his second big break: In 2000 he happened to read a wacky, odd comedy script Wain had written called “Wet Hot American Summer.”

“It felt like a truer representation of myself than most of the things I had auditioned for,” says Rudd, who ended up doing a 180 from previous roles, playing a sleazy, un-sweet camp counselor. Although the film was out for “maybe two weeks in two theaters,” says Rudd, “I was so excited to be in that movie because I knew it was different than all the stuff I’d done.”

He worked his way into Judd Apatow’s circle — “I think Paul may have stalked me,” Apatow writes via e-mail — and by 2004 he’d all but erased his romcom past. As many fans began to recognize him as the mustachioed “Anchorman” sidekick as they did a romantic hero.

Not everyone immediately understood the switch from leading guy to offbeat character actor. When “Clueless” director Amy Heckerling, who also directed Rudd in 2007′s “I Could Never Be Your Woman,” learned he’d be second banana in “Knocked Up,” “I said: ‘No, Paul, you’ve got to be the lead! You’re the guy!’ But I’m not his mother and I’m not his agent,” remembers Heckerling.

Of course, as Heckerling now says, “Knocked Up” turned out to be a wise career move, becoming the crude zeitgeist of summer 2007.

Now Rudd’s career moves have been brought nearly full circle, back to the land of the leading man. But his position in that land is rather unique: In his most recent movies, he gets to be the dashing guy who gets the girl, but he also gets to be the comic relief. Or, as Hamburg says, “He can be the center of a movie but not be boring in it.”

Rudd is aware of his changing status but doesn’t take it for granted. “I certainly feel like I have options and opportunities that I never had before,” says Rudd. “But I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

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