“You push and you work hard, you stay positive and eventually all the stars sort of align,” says Mark Ruffalo. “I feel like I’m kind of in one of those moments where everything converges at one time. It has been an interesting few years for me and kind of tough, just my inner life. I feel like I had kind of a midlife thing going on. People close to me died. It has just been a really reflective time and a growing time, so where I’m at right now feels like: ‘OK, I’m coming out of the other side of that and I survived it.’ ”
Ruffalo appears in Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher, which was a hit at Cannes and is on the roster for next month's Dubai International Film Festival, as well as the family drama Infinitely Polar Bear (already acclaimed at Sundance). The films cap a busy year for the actor – one that has already included the indie success Begin Again, in which he plays a wayward middle-aged record executive, and the Emmy-winning HBO drama The Normal Heart, based on Larry Kramer's play about the early years of the Aids outbreak in New York City. He has also been shooting Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Ruffalo, 46, is widely admired for his warm sincerity and emotional openness as an actor. He has worked steadily, mixing character and leading parts since his breakout role in Kenneth Lonergan's tender sibling drama You Can Count on Me (2001), including an Oscar nomination for 2010's The Kids Are All Right. But it has been an often interrupted journey.
Shortly after You Can Count on Me – just when he was eagerly sought by Hollywood after 12 long years of fighting for parts – Ruffalo had a benign brain tumour diagnosed. His face was paralysed for a time. In 2008, his younger brother Scott was killed in Beverly Hills, a case that remains unsolved.
Ruffalo describes his recent years, which involved struggling to balance his work and home life – he is married to the actress Sunrise Coigney and they have three children – as “a roiling dis-assemblage”.
“Everything was reforming,” he says. “It’s starting to settle.”
What's striking about Ruffalo's current streak is his physical transformation – and his morphing into Hulk in The Avengers is just the beginning. In Foxcatcher, he plays the American Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz, a role for which he added muscle mass and grew a beard.
The transformation shows mostly off the mat – in Schultz’s physically affectionate bearing. It’s a fitting part for Ruffalo, who wrestled in high school while growing up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, before dedicating himself to theatre.
“I’m really getting into the physical life of a character and how it’s different than me,” says Ruffalo.
"To see how much he's grown and stretched himself and how many different kind of parts he's played – I'm so happy he's become so successful," says Lonergan, who essentially discovered Ruffalo. Lonergan has also cast Ruffalo in his play (currently revived on Broadway) This Is Our Youth. "He's very, very predictably unchanged by it and still a sweet, self-effacing person with very good values, very kind-hearted and loving. And I think that all comes out in his acting."
It was Ruffalo's Terry – aimless but loveable – in You Can Count on Me that made the writer and director Maya Forbes want him for Infinitely Polar Bear. Ruffalo plays a manic depressive father of two girls.
"That movie, you could draw a direct line to Infinitely Polar Bear," says Forbes. "It's the same kind of person who you care about deeply but is so flawed."
For Ruffalo, You Can Count on Me remains a touchstone, too.
“I feel like I’ll never get back to that level of acting, in a way,” he says. “I’m probably more polished as an actor and I’ve grown as an actor beyond that, but it’s just so raw and honest-feeling. I look at that guy and I’m like: ‘That guy was good.’ ”
Ruffalo, who is a persistent advocate of clean energy, has grown into a fully mature, versatile actor since You Can Count on Me.
“I’ve really committed myself in a way I really never had,” says Ruffalo. “I feel like, maybe, I’ve always held back a tiny little bit because then I could always say, well, if a movie doesn’t do well, if people don’t appreciate what I’ve done, it’s ’cause I didn’t go all the way. I’m acutely aware that I’m getting older. I probably have another five, 10 years if I’m lucky, in front of the camera where I can still do a lot of stuff, and then I think I’ll be on the downward side of it. So I want to make these last few years count.”
