Mark Ruffalo has taken a flip. “I’m so sick of being so well-behaved,” he says. “I just want to take the ship as close to the reef as I can without actually crashing it. And maybe I’ll crash it too. I don’t give a sh*t anymore.”
It’s honest to say that previous to his Poor Things position, Ruffalo’s credit are suffering from likeable males: Jen Garner’s pretty greatest buddy Matt in 13 Going on 30; the right-side-of-justice Inspector Toschi in Zodiac; real-life environmental activist Rob Bilott in Dark Waters; the abuse-exposing journalist Mike Rezendes in Spotlight… Even his Marvel franchise Hulk is deeply loveable. That’s to not say Ruffalo’s work has remotely one-note—the person has been Oscar-nominated 4 occasions—however there’s a high quality of sincerity that lends itself to the full-hearted males he has performed.
So, it was exhausting to think about Mark Ruffalo as a cad. A correct, moustache-twirling, lock-up-your-daughters cad. But then got here Yorgos Lanthimos together with his Poor Things script. He was set on Ruffalo to play the predatory, pompous, all-round-awful Duncan Wedderburn—a narcissistic nightmare of a person who steals Emma Stone’s Bella away from her Frankenstein-esque ‘father’, performed by Willem Dafoe.
The Duncan character was so wacky, so on the market, that originally, Ruffalo tried to speak Lanthimos out of casting him. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m the right person for this,’” he says now. “Yorgos said, ‘Yes, you are. You are him.’ He just laughed at me, basically.”
In Poor Things, Duncan whisks the much-younger Bella away on a cruise, anticipating adoration and admiration with zero complication. He is the image of poisonous masculinity with an enormous ego and plenty of shouty posturing, however sadly for him, his new girlfriend is definitely resurrected from the useless with a child’s mind implanted in her head. Bella has no data of propriety, no sense of disgrace or societal expectations, and operates solely on logic, curiosity and pure pleasure. So, whereas Duncan enjoys her enthusiastic, unapologetic love of intercourse, she additionally offers his cash away to the poor and steamrolls over his machismo, unnoticing. Consequently, his psyche implodes in shock. It’s an unbelievable position and an completely sudden selection for Ruffalo.
Emma Stone and Ruffalo in Poor Things.
Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures/Everett Collection
Has Lanthimos ever mentioned how he knew Ruffalo had it in him?
“No. The last time I talked to him, he was just like, ‘You’re a terrible dancer.’”
Lanthimos gave Ruffalo no notes in any respect. Before capturing, he inspired Ruffalo to take a look at some examples of dance and motion, starting with a Belgian dance-theater firm known as Peeping Tom. “There’s a thing they do called Triptych. And there’s one particular thing he showed me [in Le Salon]. It’s this beautiful dance-acting-movement piece. It’s a husband and a wife and their baby, and the whole time, they’re kissing and they’re turning and they’re on the floor and they’re up. Their mouths never leave each other, and it’s the most beautiful moving, sexy thing. Yeah, he didn’t give me any notes. He wasn’t like, ‘I think this character is like this.’ He just handed me that.”
And, throughout capturing, there continued to be no notes. One signal that Ruffalo was heading in the right direction was if Lanthimos laughed. The different was if Lanthimos mentioned the phrases, “That’s enough of that.”
In rehearsal, when Ruffalo discovered that Duncan needed to be actually massive for it to work, Dafoe had ideas. “Willem was like, “You’re really going to do that? Really?” Ruffalo says. “But I was kind of like, ‘F*ck it.’”
And someway, Ruffalo’s eye-roll-y bodily comedy, his timing, his olde-worlde plummy English accent and puppy-dog pathos, even his dancing in an unforgettable ballroom scene, complement Stone’s unabashed Bella.
The position stirred one thing distant and long-forgotten in Ruffalo. “It reminded me a lot of my early theater days, where I was just very courageous and kind of dangerous,” he says. “For some reason over the years, I’ve been keeping it very restrained, and all the parts I’ve been playing called for that. This is a part that no one would’ve expected me in.”
If Ruffalo’s earlier roles have been “restrained” as he places it, it’s tempting to surprise what influenced that outlook.
Back in 2001, he was driving excessive. His first massive film You Can Count on Me, reverse Laura Linney, had been a success at Sundance the 12 months earlier than, and he’d lastly been in a position to give up bartending after 12 years. He was on the set of The Last Castle with James Gandolfini and Robert Redford. His spouse Sunrise Coigney was about to have their first child. Life was good.
Ruffalo because the Incredible Hulk.
Marvel/Walt Disney/Everett Collection
Then, one night time, he had an odd dream. In it got here a direct message of doom. “It wasn’t even a voice or a scene playing out,” Ruffalo says. “It was just, ‘You have a brain tumor, and you have to deal with it immediately.’ It was just this clear knowledge.”
That realizing was so sturdy that Ruffalo acquired a CAT scan. And he did have a mind tumor—one the scale of a golf ball. Surgery adopted, and he misplaced some feeling in his face, some listening to, and his profession, all of sudden.
“People were like, ‘He has AIDS. He’s a drug addict,’ because I disappeared,” he says. “There were all these rumors going around Hollywood, and I had to drop out. I was cast in an M. Night Shyamalan movie. I was going to co-star with Mel Gibson, and they were going to pay me a lot of money. And it just all evaporated. I thought I was going to die. We had a baby, and then 10 days later, I had my brain tumor removed. I had this newborn, and we were starting a life, and my career was now suddenly gone. So, it just was like, ‘I have to fight for this, and I have to survive somehow.’ I looked at death, but I also looked at not being an actor. What am I going to do? And really, when you spend your whole life trying to do one thing and then all of it’s gone, it just gives you a different relationship to it all.” So Ruffalo fought again, after which some. “I was just so much more desperate,” he says.
Now, at 56, with a stellar profession below his belt, he’s, as he says, within the temper to sail near the shore, to even crash the ship. “You get to an age in Hollywood, and it’s like you’re on the other side of it a little bit, and it’s starting to feel like that for me. I love acting, but I was also like, ‘Huh. Have I reached what I’m able to do now?’ The internet and social media brand you, and it just feels very oppressive in a way. I didn’t really realize how oppressive it was feeling until I was doing Duncan, and then I was like, ‘Oh, my god. I haven’t been able to really…’ Everything I’ve done is very creative, I think, and I’ve gotten to explore things that I wanted to explore, and express things that I wanted to express, and I don’t mean to take anything away from that, but it just started to feel a little bit like I was stuck, and it was a languishing feeling.”
But the wild-card character has peeked by means of somewhat in his previous decisions, he says. He notes there was even a taste of Duncan in his 2010 movie The Kids Are Alright. That position was “sort of in the line of Duncan. I’ve gotten to play some characters that are reminiscent of Duncan, like the baby seeds of Duncan. Even You Can Count on Me, that character, they’re these ne’er-do-wells that you sort of love.” He mentions, too, that he performed The Kids Are Alright position as an homage to his brother Scott, whose homicide in 2008 continues to be unsolved.
Ruffalo with Rory Culkin in You Can Count On Me.
Paramount Classics/Everett Collection
As a father, Ruffalo has leaned into the themes of Poor Things, like what it would imply to take away all societal oppression from a younger girl. “What I immediately thought was so great about it, what was so clear, was that she’s totally in control of her own sexuality. She’s a fully-grown, physically developed woman who’s never had any of the conditioning… My girls tell me, ‘It sucks being a girl.’ By age 10, they were already like, ‘I don’t want to wear girls’ clothes, because I don’t like the way I’m being treated as a girl.’ And so, they were really aware of that conditioning, and the movie slaps that in the face.”
And then there’s the publicity of Duncan’s paper-thin self, his poisonous masculinity, and the societal expectations of males, too. As Duncan breaks down sobbing, utterly shattered by Bella’s indifference, Lanthimos and Ruffalo present us one thing that goes properly past plain previous blame and disgrace.
“I have women friends that I know that say, ‘I love Duncan. I was really pulling for him. I felt so bad for him,’ or guys were like, ‘Man, I didn’t know what to make of that dude. But at the end I was like, oh, god, poor guy. I felt a lot of sympathy for him.’”
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We’ll see Ruffalo quickly in Bong Joon-ho’s much-anticipated Mickey 17, and Ruffalo pulls a thread between that position and Duncan too. It’s “another pretty brave performance”, he says. “It’s pretty far out there, and he is not a good guy. He’s a proto-fascist a little bit. They’re both narcissists in their own [way], and they’re timely, these characters, I feel like. These men, they’re up for discussion right now. They’re all around us, the hubris billionaire boys who just get whatever they want, but are just so fragile… It’s our shadow, it’s the unexpressed animus of the deeply fragile male psyche. I think it’s scary for a lot of men, including myself at times, but it’s all about totality, the wholeness of your personality and identity and coming into balance yourself.”
He pauses and checks himself. Ruffalo can certainly play the hell out of a villain, and he’s completely smashed the good-guy character mildew, however now he stops and smiles apologetically. He can’t assist it. “I’m a guy, so I might be talking out of my ass,” he says.