Q: Congratulations on ‘Poor Things’, what a character. He’s so horrible! Were you nervous about taking him on?
A: Yeah, I had never done anything quite like that. I mean, I was skating around it but never had done an accent like that, I hadn’t done a period piece.
I had been playing crusaders, I had been playing the opposite of that guy for a while and I’ve been a naturalistic actor. And all of those things just started to feel incredibly oppressive to me. But I still wasn’t ready to make the leap away from it.
Q: It’s a very theatrical part.
A: Well, I’ve had a lot of theatre friends reach out to me, like, ‘Listen, I love your work. I’ve loved it for such a long time. But to see you go back to that kind of playful, physical comedy that’s so daring and broad, was so exciting to me and reminded me so much of our lean days when it didn’t matter.’
Q: So there was this sort of three-week playful rehearsal period, how did that feed what you were able to do and maybe give you confidence?
A: You’re usually lucky if you have a read-through in a movie and we had three weeks of rehearsal. And literally, all we did was do theatre games and make ourselves look like the biggest idiots you could look like in front of each other. I mean, we were doing interpretive dancing both forward and reverse at 60 frames a second. We were singing, we were rolling around on the ground, we were puppeteering each other. It was ridiculous.
Q: Somehow it ended up in the movie! Like the dance sequence?
A: That, we choreographed, but it was also in the spirit of that play. And that playfulness. And that sense of playfulness creates a sense of freedom and a space for you to feel free to explore and safe to explore in.
This is a very physical movie, especially for Emma [Stone] and me. And we needed that. And [the director] Yorgos [Lanthimos] in his infinite wisdom, yes, he knew how to lead us to that but never let us be in our heads. He did not once give me a note about the character. We didn’t talk about the script.
When we read it, it was after eight hours of playing games, we’d read 10 pages, close the book, and come back the next day. And during the course of that, we’re trying on costumes and hairdos and playing with the accent and so it was all sort of working together.
We just weren’t approaching it from our heads, we were approaching it from our bodies, the relationship we were creating with each other. And this beautiful, hilarious script.
Q: He is so awful at times but we do end up caring about him — a little?
A: You know, he’s so broken. He’s such a child. And he’s such a narcissist. But when you tear away the layers of all of that projection and falsity, you see the most insecure, damaged people. And we got to see what we’re seeing on the world stage in a comedy, but they’re paper thin, you know, he’s paper-thin when it comes down to it.
And maybe it’s that we see him for the nothing that he really feels he is. That gives us sympathy for him, maybe a little. I don’t know.
Q: When he comes crawling back to Bella in the rain, it’s so great.
A: It’s such a great part. It’s the best part ever.
Q: Let’s go back to the beginning, to Kenosha, Wisconsin and your mother cut hair and you moved to Virginia Beach with your construction father. Is that all right?
A: That’s the truth.
Q: And were they supportive of your artistic leanings?
A: Yeah, they were very supportive. Even though they were probably very frightened. They were very supportive of me. Especially my mom and dad, Frank and Marie Ruffalo. My other family, my more extended family were not. They told me, ‘You’re crazy. No one ever makes it in that business.’ But my mom and dad were really beautiful.
Q: So you moved to San Diego and you just recently got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Did that feel good?
A: That felt really good. It felt way better than I’d ever imagined it feeling. I ended up in on Hollywood Boulevard, literally, in 1986 when I was 18 years old to start at the Stella Adler Conservatory; it’s the Stella Adler Acting Academy now.
I was there for about seven years when Hollywood Boulevard was pretty much a warzone. It was the height of the Aids epidemic. It was just after they cleared out any kind of hospitals for mentally ill people. It was the crack years. It was a really tough place.
And so just to be there, and I was so broke, I couldn’t pay attention. And, you know, walking up and down that Boulevard 1000s of times over the years saying each person’s name — Marlon Brando, Kermit the Frog [laughs]… It was in me, but it was so far away from anything that I had ever imagined happening. I mean, I would have just been happy just to pay my way, my rent, being an actor.
Q: How did you support yourself?
A: I did everything. I painted houses. I did landscape work. I was a telemarketer — that was fun. I literally didn’t sell one thing!
I actually called my uncle I was like, ‘Can you please buy a gross of line printer ribbons, please? It’s 200 bucks, please?’ And I was a busboy. I was a waiter. I was a barback. And pretty much I rounded up my career with a lustrous bartending career for eight years.
Q: So did you have a strong preference for theatre, for film, for television. Is there one medium that is yours?
A: I started in the theatre. We did probably 30 plays in the 12 years that I was living in Los Angeles. We had a little 60-seat house theatre. And we were all just these kind of poor theatre rats. And literally, that’s where I thought I was going to be, and that’s probably where I’m the most comfortable. Duncan Wedderburn [his Poor Things role] is probably the closest that I’ve got to the same kind of freedom that I have on stage. But I love it all. I’m an acting cockroach, I just I love it all. I love acting.
Q: In 2002 you were diagnosed with a brain tumour?
A: That was fun. It was benign, but I had to get it out.
Q: And your wife was pregnant at the time?
A: Sunrise was pregnant with my son Keen. Yeah, it was really scary. And when I had the tumour removed, I woke up and my face was partially paralysed. And then just over the course of eight hours, I just was totally paralysed on the left side of my face. I couldn’t even close my eye. And I was like, ‘Oh, no. Who is going to hire a paralysed actor with a paralysed face, especially when he can’t even close his eye.’
And yeah, that was a really hard time. The recovery was really hard. And I just had the most amazing partner in Sunrise. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t easy for either of us. And yeah, we all got through it.
Q: And you recovered completely, except for maybe a little hearing loss?
A: I lost my hearing. I did make a deal, with/if there is an entity that’s greater than us. And it was like, ‘Dude, you could take my hearing, but don’t take my kid’s father’. And that’s what happened. The moral of that story is to be careful what deals you make [laughs]. I probably could have gotten away with less.
Q: So when did you move your family to upstate New York and do you still live there?
A: You know, we were lucky enough, Sunny and I, to get that place just before the brain tumour. And it’s beautiful, it was two-and-a-half hours outside of New York in kind of rural part of New York. And we’ve had it now for 22 years.
And it was a place where we would always go, when I was done with a job, with the kids. And then we moved to LA and I was doing everything here and my brother passed away in 2008. And Los Angeles just became a very kind of haunted place.
And we were like, ‘Hey, let’s take the kids. Let’s give them a life in the country. They can run around naked. They can find toads and frogs and snakes and swim in the creek or the pond and have a normal life outside of Hollywood’.
I think I kind of remember one of my son’s friends telling another friend, ‘My father’s movie grossed 100 million this weekend’. And he was seven. And I thought, ‘I don’t know if this is where I want to raise kids’. So we went upstate, and that was around 2008.
Q: Let’s talk about Hulk. When this was announced at Comic Con everyone thought Ed Norton was supposed to be playing that role? What happened?
A: My dear friend, Robert Downey Jr, he was introducing me. He told me that I should play the Hulk, and it was going to be a big surprise for everybody. And he said, ‘And now reprising the role of Bruce Banner: Mark Ruffalo’. And they all went, ‘Huh?’
And I think the word ‘reprising’ which meant ‘playing again’, which meant Ed Norton, kind of threw them off. And so my big reveal was completely botched. And my stepping on to that stage was a huge disappointment, right off the bat.
Q: But you made it your own. How has being the Hulk changed your life?
A: I mean, it’s been just amazing. It’s been a huge. Just a huge, huge blessing and a gift and made so much more possible. It just opened up just an enormous amount of possibilities. But just also, you know, figuring that out, figuring that technology out and being kind of a pioneer in that technology.
And getting to span this whole kind of crazy arc that Bruce Banner and the Hulk make over all of these films over the course of 12 years. And just getting to develop this character and having a long period of time to do it. And it paid really well, which can’t be discounted. But I try to never ever take anything just for money. I think I’ve done a good job. And I didn’t take that just for money either.
Q: The other thing you pushed into existence was The Normal Heart. That took a long time?
A: I mean, yeah, that’s a beautiful movie. That was with Larry Kramer, the famous Aids activist who began ACT UP, and basically began outing closeted, powerful gay men. And he was radical. But he believed that the world needed to see how many gay people lived among us, in order to save their lives from Aids. And I had the honour of spending quite a bit of time with him.
And he opened his heart to me, and really, that performance is a homage to him, and his life work. I was very close to him up to the moment he passed away. And that was just a huge gift.
Q: Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher was another true story. This is one where you had to bulk up and wrestle Channing Tatum. Were you confident about that one?
A: No. I mean, I was a wrestler in high school. So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll nail that down.’ And then I found out I used to wrestle as a righty. So every move is from the right side. And Dave Schultz, the character I was playing, was from the left. So not only did I have to re-learn, I had to forget everything I knew, and then re-learn it all again, on the opposite side. It was about four months of training for that.
And Channing Tatum and I both want to be the dominant male, which spells a lot of trouble for me. Seeing how he was like 30 pounds bigger than me and stronger than me and about 15 years younger than me. So I just kept getting hurt.
Q: You also got the world’s worst haircut?
A: [Laughs] I did. I had a terrible haircut.
Q: You got an Oscar nom for Foxcatcher and Spotlight? Can you talk a bit about the latter?
A: That was a horrible story. That was about, that’s kids, you know, those are kids. And what happened to them was horrible.
And we were right in the middle of that story and right in the middle of their lives. And the truth is, it could have been us, it could have been anyone.
Q: So was that character just holding all of that emotion in him for too long, and then it exploded?
A: Yeah, he’s a journalist. And so the rule of journalism is not to get emotionally involved. And this guy was a consummate journalist. But what he was experiencing was so big and what they were all experiencing was so big and what they were uncovering was so big and it covered centuries.
And it was the Vatican, it was one of the great superpowers. And it had been covered up for so long that they were in a pressure cooker. And they’re up against time. They were so desperate for justice. And it was just always out of reach.
Q: It won best picture?
A: It changed the world. That movie created laws. It forced the Pope, it forced the Vatican, it forced the American Catholic Church, it forced the European Catholic Churches. All throughout the world that movie changed things for the better for people. And that’s the power of cinema. That’s the beauty of it. And it won Best Picture.
Q: In a similar vein, you worked very hard to get Dark Waters made, which is all about the DuPont poisoning scandal. What changes resulted from that movie?
A: It was the story of the lawyer, Rob Bilott, who had for decades been uncovering the nightmare poisoning of the world with rubber chemicals and no one would listen to him. And it’s the most beautiful, harrowing journey of this guy who had everything against him. He was working for a corporate law firm that would protect people like Du Pont.
And it was only through a childhood friend who came to him and said: ‘My animals are being poisoned, I need your help’. That call from the most innocent time of his life, made him turn against the very people who he had spent his life defending. One in a million — people like this. But these are the people that change the world.
Q: What’s next? You’ve got a TV series? Hal & Harper?
A: Yeah, during the Screen Actors’ strike. SAG was encouraging actors to go out and make independents so that we could show the studios that it could actually be done. That we could make something and still honour the actors and honour this new contract that the actors were asking for, and it wasn’t going to stop us from working. It was doable.
And I really believed in that and I think we need competition in the marketplace and by making great independent films, it makes the other films better. And it lets other people get involved that normally wouldn’t get a chance. So I did Hal & Harper. We did 10 half-hour episodes for $5million, which is impossible.
Q: Did you sell it?
A: Not yet. They are still cutting it — but the idea is to sell that. So it’s never been done, there’s never been an independent television show ever made. And then I’m going off to do Brad Inglesby’s next TV show. He did Mare of Easttown with Kate Winslet.
- The Interview People
