Mark Ruffalo has taken a turn. “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 fair to say that prior to his Poor Things role, Ruffalo’s credits are littered with likeable men: Jen Garner’s lovely best friend 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 not to say Ruffalo’s work has been remotely one-note—the man has been Oscar-nominated four times—but there’s a quality of sincerity that lends itself to the full-hearted men he has played.
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So, it was hard to imagine Mark Ruffalo as a cad. A proper, moustache-twirling, lock-up-your-daughters cad. But then came Yorgos Lanthimos 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 man who steals Emma Stone’s Bella away from her Frankenstein-esque ‘father’, played by Willem Dafoe.
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The Duncan character was so wacky, so out there, that initially, Ruffalo tried to talk 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, expecting adoration and admiration with zero complication. He is the picture of toxic masculinity with a vast ego and lots of shouty posturing, but unfortunately for him, his new girlfriend is actually resurrected from the dead with a baby’s brain implanted in her head. Bella has no knowledge of propriety, no sense of shame or societal expectations, and operates only on logic, curiosity and pure joy. So, while Duncan enjoys her enthusiastic, unapologetic love of sex, she also gives his money away to the poor and steamrolls over his machismo, unnoticing. Consequently, his psyche implodes in shock. It’s an incredible role and an utterly unexpected choice for Ruffalo.
Has Lanthimos ever said 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 at all. Before shooting, he encouraged Ruffalo to look at some examples of dance and movement, beginning with a Belgian dance-theater company called 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, during shooting, there continued to be no notes. One sign that Ruffalo was on the right track was if Lanthimos laughed. The other was if Lanthimos said the words, “That’s enough of that.”
In rehearsal, when Ruffalo figured out that Duncan had to be really big for it to work, Dafoe had thoughts. “Willem was like, “You’re really going to do that? Really?” Ruffalo says. “But I was kind of like, ‘F*ck it.’”
And somehow, Ruffalo’s eye-roll-y physical 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 role stirred something 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 previous roles were “restrained” as he puts it, it’s tempting to wonder what influenced that outlook.
Back in 2001, he was riding high. His first big movie You Can Count on Me, opposite Laura Linney, had been a hit at Sundance the year before, and he’d finally been able to quit bartending after 12 years. He was on the set of The Last Castle with James Gandolfini and Robert Redford. His wife Sunrise Coigney was about to have their first baby. Life was good.
Then, one night, he had a strange dream. In it came 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 knowing was so strong that Ruffalo got a CAT scan. And he did have a brain tumor—one the size of a golf ball. Surgery followed, and he lost some feeling in his face, some hearing, and his career, all at once.
“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 back, and then some. “I was just so much more desperate,” he says.
Now, at 56, with a stellar career under his belt, he is, as he says, in the mood to sail close to 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 through a little in his past choices, he says. He notes there was even a flavor of Duncan in his 2010 film The Kids Are Alright. That role 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 played The Kids Are Alright role as an homage to his brother Scott, whose murder in 2008 is still unsolved.
As a father, Ruffalo has leaned into the themes of Poor Things, like what it might mean to remove all societal oppression from a young woman. “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 exposure of Duncan’s paper-thin self, his toxic masculinity, and the societal expectations of men, too. As Duncan breaks down sobbing, completely shattered by Bella’s indifference, Lanthimos and Ruffalo show us something that goes well beyond plain old blame and shame.
“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.’”
We’ll see Ruffalo soon in Bong Joon-ho’s much-anticipated Mickey 17, and Ruffalo pulls a thread between that role 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 surely play the hell out of a villain, and he’s absolutely smashed the good-guy character mold, but now he stops and smiles apologetically. He can’t help it. “I’m a guy, so I might be talking out of my ass,” he says.