Crushed beer cans. Air guitar. Progressive rock. This is the stuff cinema-goers connect to the on-screen bro-world of actors Paul Rudd (right) and Adam Scott, whose careers in comedy are littered with the detritus of late-onset manhood. Turns out, two of the three associations are accurate—it’s not Rush, but Billy Joel shattering their real-life speakers. Rudd and Scott, 42 and 38, respectively, and best friends for going on two decades, are both married with children and living in Los Angeles. But that doesn’t mean they don’t still make time to indulge their inner man-boys.

Rudd and Scott wrapped Our Idiot Brother, their first feature film as costars (Scott has a cameo in 2007’s Knocked Up, in which Rudd delivers the line, “Marriage is like an unfunny, tense version of Everybody Loves Raymond”), after just six weeks of shooting last year. In the film, which also stars Zooey Deschanel and Rashida Jones, Rudd plays Ned, a sometimes infuriatingly positive neo-hippie (he owns a golden retriever named Willie Nelson) who’s arrested for selling weed to a uniformed cop. After Ned gets out of prison early for—what else—good behavior, he heads to the big city to live with each of his three self-obsessed sisters in a carousel of haplessness, hilarity, and real insight about family dynamics. Scott’s character Jeremy is the downstairs neighbor of Miranda (Elizabeth Banks), the sister with Condé Nast bangs who’s unwittingly in love with Jeremy. While Ned’s unseemly beard and joblessness are at first grounds for dismissal from New York, with its gleaming skyscrapers and competitive grade-school applications, his honesty, filtered through hempy layers of idiotic behavior, eventually reveals him to be their moral superior and the movie’s bleeding heart.

One Sunday in July, after a photo shoot that Scott describes as “a disaster and a triumph,” these two friends called BlackBook from a room filled with naked girls (more on that below) to talk about the Grateful Dead, testicles, and Kyle MacLachlan.

BLACKBOOK: Adam, basically the first thing listed on your IMDb profile is that you’re friends with Paul Rudd. How did you two meet, and what was the moment when you realized you’d be BFFs forever? ADAM SCOTT: We met in 1992. I had just gotten to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in LA, and Paul had just graduated. Paul was already the school celebrity because he’d done a Nintendo commercial right out of the gate. Everyone was like, “Holy shit—he’s in SAG.”

So you hit it off straight away? PAUL RUDD: Well, we both had long hair. We both really liked R.E.M. And those were the days of Automatic for the People, so there was a lot to talk about.

Our Idiot Brother is the first movie you’ve been in together as costars. AS: It’s weird that this is the first time we’ve really worked together. PR: Especially since we’ve literally been friends for 20 years and have the same taste in movies and comedy. AS: I have to credit Paul for my career going in the direction it’s gone these past few years. I was just kind of around the summer they were making Knocked Up, hanging out and going to barbeques. And then this really tiny part popped up—the role of a male nurse—and Paul and Shauna Robertson, who was producing it, were like, “Let’s just have Adam do it.” PR: And now you’re taking over the world.

In Our Idiot Brother, Paul, your character, Ned, is played for laughs while Adam’s character, Jeremy, is a more classic straight man. What’s the difference, and is there one type you prefer? PR: There are certain characters who are so ridiculous—Anchorman would be an example—that they’re almost like caricatures. With Ned, while there’s something inherently funny about his look, I tried to play him as a multidimensional person and not as a hippie or a stoner. I’ve never really viewed roles in terms of funny or straight, in the same way that I don’t distinguish that much between certain comedies and certain dramas. I think they coexist. AS: If you think about the funniest performances, they’re usually funny because the person is so dead serious.

That said, you do some fine noodling in one scene, Paul. Were you ever a Deadhead? PR: There was a time in college when I had really long hair, but that had more to do with INXS than the Grateful Dead. There were about six months where I thought, Maybe I’m kind of granola. Maybe I should totally be into camping. But in truth, I always felt like an imposter. I saw the Grateful Dead one time in my life and it was with Sting in Las Vegas. AS: I was at that show! PR: I was like, I’m going to do this because everyone’s supposed to do this, right? You’re supposed to see the Dead. I didn’t do any drugs, but I remember being really bored and watching other people on drugs freak out. One kid was having a really bad time. AS: It was broiling hot in a giant stadium packed with people in the desert. PR: But as far as basing Ned on anyone, not really—it was more like, this is a guy who sees the good in everything, who keeps trying to be super-positive. Ned looks like an organic farmer from upstate New York, but I didn’t really concern myself with thinking, Is he a stoner? You know, there are very similar qualities between Jesse Peretz, our director, and this character. Jesse is so nice and so thoughtful, to the point where he would give direction but he didn’t want to insult anybody. I’d be like, Should I do something different here, Jesse? And he’d be like, “No, man, it’s all good!”

How much do you rely on improvisation as comedians? AS: There was a lot of improvisation on Step Brothers. I remember it being really frightening, and it took me a long time to get used to it and grow to be able to hold my own. But I remember when it was done feeling like, I don’t know if I ever want to go back to working another way. No one on set is concerned with getting it wrong. Just screw around and have fun until there’s something that’s great and then move on. Also, I’m really into nude acting. I think everyone should just get nude for a full day of shooting. PR: It’s true, Adam was always saying how we should take all our clothes off, and we’d be like, Adam, we’re done shooting for the day.

There’s a scene in Our Idiot Brother where Steve Coogan’s naked and bent over. In fact, I was trying to think of a question about Steve Coogan’s balls, which are plentifully on view, but I’m having trouble finding the words. PR: We had no idea. It was the greatest. And actually, I did strip down. I had to do a scene where I’m getting painted by Hugh Dancy, and the poor boom guy got an eyeful. I still feel like he should’ve gotten extra pay, some kind of severance. He wasn’t even our regular boom guy. He was just there for one day.

I’m surprised you’re fully naked in that scene. I always figured actors wore nude thongs or something. PR: You see the side of my body. My legs were up. I’m sure if the guy could’ve boomed the scene so that he was looking at the back of a card, as if he were looking at a solar eclipse, he would’ve done it. AS: Your penis shines pretty bright. PR: It’s a little like looking at the sun, it’s true. I think the only way you can really look at my penis is if you’re wearing a welding mask. AS: Which is why, when you see the photos we took today, I have on a welding mask.

Ned is a well-intentioned idiot who sometimes throws people under the bus because he’s uncompromisingly honest. How much stock do you put in the notion of good intentions being more important than the consequences? PR: I think … I’m having a tough time listening to your question right now because I’m on this studio’s computer looking at naked people. AS: There are naked girls. We’re in this office and there are pictures of naked people on the desktop. PR: It’s a terrible place to do an interview. But what? Good intentions?

I feel like we should talk more about the naked girls. But yeah, Ned… PR: He has a pretty idealistic way of living, which I suppose in a perfect world is the best way to be—but it’s not a perfect world. I sound like a dick. AS: Nah. PR: I sound like a total dick. I knew it as soon as I was saying it. It was a dick question. PR: It was fun to be that kind of person for six weeks. I think the title is a bit of a misnomer, actually. I don’t think he’s really an idiot. He does some things and makes some decisions that could be considered idiotic, but they are conscious decisions. He lives his life according to a certain ethic, and by doing that and really sticking to it, it actually makes him kind of noble. I’m not quite as open and un-judgmental and carefree as Ned. But I do think that if you give people the benefit of the doubt, more often than not they’ll want to live up to it.

Paul, Adam—you’ve been friends for 20 years. What was it like back in the day? AS: We had dinner together with our families last night—our wives are friends, our kids play with each other—but after dinner I was driving back past Paul’s old apartment and laughing about how many times we’d go back there at, like, four in the morning and play music. It was such a shit-hole. But we were happy listening to music so loud and staying up late just so drunk. PR: Hammered. AS: Air guitaring. PR: We’d go out to bars until they closed and then we’d go back to the apartment and just sit around and play music with, like, three or four dudes.

R.E.M.? You said you bonded over R.E.M. PR: Billy Joel. A lot of Billy Joel. AS: We were in a Billy Joel phase for a while there. It’s funny because a few weeks ago we were at Paul’s house and his son was listening to some Billy Joel. PR: He’s way into Billy Joel right now. Like, crazy—he has every single Billy Joel song, including demos. AS: He was listening to this Billy Joel live album and I was like, What’s this? He tells me so I go home and buy it, and I’ve been listening to it now for weeks. Fucking Billy Joel, man. PR: My son is 6 and that’s all he gives a shit about. Not even the hits. He’s into some Streetlife Serenade shit.

You must be a proud father. PR: Oh, completely.

What was the best part of working together on Our Idiot Brother? AS: It was fun doing that Dune stuff. [Rudd and Scott’s characters bond over the line, “Father! The sleeper has awakened!”] Didn’t we YouTube that scene from Dune so we could say Kyle MacLachlan’s line properly? PS: And then the next night we went to a premiere—and Kyle MacLachlan was there.

Did you do the line for him? PR: We both completely pussed out. AS: It’s happened enough times in my life where I’ll go up to someone and say, Here’s what we were doing yesterday! I know now that it’s never a good idea. I’m sure Kyle would’ve been lovely about it. But what would have been a big deal for us would’ve just been a mild annoyance for him.

Photography by Dan Monick. Styling by Jenny Ricker.