Mark Ruffalo Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters

The great thing about being an actor

is that you're invited into people's worlds

that you normally would never be invited into.

People want to tell their stories.

They want to be seen and they want to be understood.

As an actor you just get to go

on these incredible journeys

that most people are never invited to

or never have the opportunity to travel on.

[upbeat music]

13 Going on 30.

The character I played in 13 Going on 30 is Matt Flamhaff,

who is a pudgy awkward kid who grew up

to be a photographer,,

He fell in love with his childhood sweetheart,

played by Jennifer Garner.

Gary Winnick, rest in peace.

We came up in the kind of indie New York theater

and film scene.

He got this chance to do a big budget film,

and it was 13 Going on 30.

And he's like, Hey man, I want to do this romantic comedy,

but I don't want to do it like all these other things.

I want it to have a message.

He gave me a script, but it wasn't great

and we all worked on it, to try

and make it into something that we felt

would be worthy of our time.

And we shot it, and it came out really, really nice.

I didn't know it was gonna become iconic.

I did know that the the messages in it were real.

You know, we played it all as real as we could.

And I think it's a in a weird way,

a really wholesome movie for for young women and young men.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Michel Gondry was this amazing director

that everyone wanted to work with.

I heard about that he was doing a movie

and I asked for the script,

and they told me it's just kind of a small part in it.

And I read it and I was like yeah,

it is a small part but I just think I could do something

kind of fun and cool with this,

but I'd like to talk to him.

So I had a meeting with Michel and I was like,

so saw I see this guy, he sits in his room by himself

playing the bass in his underwear, you know like.

I see him with like a pompadour.

He's like A pompadour!

I was like I don't know, kind of like that,

but like a mohawk, like half mohawk.

You know he's really into the clash,

and none of that was in the script really.

Michel was like, I love this man,

this sounds cool, this man!,

and he cast me.

It was an amazing experience

and we improvised so much of that movie

and we were writing it on the fly.

They came to us and like you're shooting

36,000 feet of film a day.

We had like four cameras rolling nonstop,

and focus actually came in and like shut us down.

They're like, You can't shoot this much.

But the camera would be rolling,

when we were just sitting there [beep] around.

And then Michel loved that.

He used a lot of that stuff in there.

Kirsten Dunst, there's this great scene

of us dancing in our underwear,

with Jim Carey's body laying there [chuckles].

That was totally improvised,

came out of us like passing a joint around

and like really feeling, oh I'm feeling that feeling,

you know, and then it just broke out

in this spontaneous stupid dancing.

To this day, like, a really sweet, sweet movie moment.

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Zodiac.

Sometimes you're making characters up,

sometimes you're playing real people

and in that I played David Toschi,

who I was fortunate was still alive.

You're reading a script and you get one idea of a person.

He's like this hard-boiled, San Francisco murder cop.

And I'm gonna play him tough,

and then I said well I'd love to meet David Toschi.

Everyone is freaked out,

like you really want to meet him.

I was like yeah, I want to go hang out with him.

So I took a commuter flight to San Francisco.

And I went and met him.

He was working in a little security firm.

I went and spent the day with him.

I spent a few days with him in San Francisco.

I found that when you're playing other people,

the best thing to do is to get them drunk

or a little bit drunk,

because then that's when they really open up to you.

But you have to put yourself on the line too.

So you have to tell some embarrassing stories

about yourself first.

But after a while he won my trust.

He already looked at me like,

who's this Hollywood kid, what is he doing here?

I really like created a nice rapport with him

and really realized that my idea,

my Hollywood idea of him

was so far off from the truth.

And who he was and the idiosyncratic aspects

of the way he talked, the way he dressed,

even down to eating the animal crackers

were so much more interesting

than anything that I could have come up.

Some one have any animal crackers?

Animal crackers?

They're in the car.

I'm saving those for later.

David Fincher, who is my hero

and we had the most just incredible

kind of collaboration on that.

He's still one of my close friends.

We were all in my trailer, one night,

a Friday night drinking

and Fincher who never really carouses with the crew,

and he keeps a really strong border

between fraternizing, I poke my head out of my trailer,

and he was standing out there with an empty glass.

And he's smoking a cigarette,

probably his 10th cigarette in his life

and I was like, David.

He's like, Yeah, oh hey!

I was like, you wanna come in?

'Cause I'd always invite him to come by.

He's like, Oh are you are you guys there?

And I was like, yeah come on up.

And he's like, Oh, I guess I will then.

And he came in and I poured him a big shot of bourbon,

and we're sitting there.

After a while it was just him and I.

I'm like, how's it goin'?

He's like, I don't know.

And I said, [laughs] what do you mean?

And he's like, I don't know if they're gonna

kill me or not.

I don't know if this is working.

To have that kind of a moment with that kind of director,

in that kind of vulnerability

is also another gift of being in this business.

[upbeat music]

Shutter Island.

We have rehearsals and Marty was okay

these are the films I want you to see.

I have a screening room,

and we're going to watch these movies together.

And I'm sitting there, it's me and Marty and Leo.

We're watching Out of the Past.

And I turned to Marty and I'm like Marty,

what if my character,

because he's playing this other character,

that's not him, what if he went and watched

all these Robert Mitchum movies

and he's like doing a Robert Mitchum imitation,

because he sees it as the hard-boiled detective

that he thinks he should be.

And he's like, Oh yeah, do whatever you want kid.

We'll look at it.

We'll see how it works.

And so, yeah, I did that, and that whole character

came out of that Out of the Past screening.

It doesn't exactly square with Teddy Daniels,

the man in the legend, I'll give you that.

Leo and I went through like this crazy journey.

It was six months in rain.

We were wet the whole time.

We had wetsuits on underneath our clothes.

And I just remember, going to his trailer

and playing Xbox totally soaked,

shooting this you know 1930s movie

and we're in period costume.

The Kids are All Right.

[upbeat music]

My brother had just passed away just before that.

And I was really disillusioned

probably with my life but also like filmmaking,

and I was like this is gonna be my last movie as an actor.

It was an homage to my brother, the character.

My brother was this just incredibly charismatic

sexy dangerous, beautiful, fun, vivacious human being.

And so I'm like I'm gonna play him in this movie.

It was a great experience.

I felt free in a way that I hadn't

in a long, long time, as an actor.

I remember I made peace with the idea of stopping acting

and transitioning into more directing and writing.

I was at Sundance with it.

And I'll never forget I was sitting in the audience,

the first time I'd ever seen it,

and I heard the audience's response to it,

which was so sincere and beautiful

and was addressing this moment in time

and culture where we're talking about gay marriage,

and I saw like how important a film could be,

how much people enjoyed it

and how much I actually enjoyed it, really, deeply.

When I got outside the business of Hollywood

and just purely like the experience

of making films I was like, okay,

I'm not going anywhere.

And so I gave up the idea of like, you know,

what are the box offices,

what are the reviews?

What all that [beep] is and just focused

on what I actually had control over, and what gave me joy.

Annette Bening, Julianne Moore [chuckles].

The love scenes, the crazy,

you know, triangle, the humor.

What is wrong with me?

It's everything that I loved about cinema

and why I wanted to do it, and I just felt really free.

[upbeat music]

The original Avengers.

Part of me was like I'm the wrong guy.

This world, I don't know how to do this.

Joss Whedon sat me down and said,

No, I think you are the guy.

I said, I can't really sign on

to doing something unless I read a script.

That's the only power I have as an actor,

to be able to say no to something.

I don't know what the hell you're making.

He's like, How about if I send you 20 pages?

I read the scene when Black Widow comes to find Banner.

I read that scene and I knew the tone of it.

Then I will need to you to come in.

What if I say, no?

I'll persuade you.

And what if the other guy says, no?

And then I got a call from Robert Downey,

who's my hero, and he said, Come on, Ruffalo, we got this.

And that was it and I was in.

I've done so much motion capture.

I had to wear what I call the man canceling suit,

which is this really tight leotard

that makes you look big where you wanna look small

and small where you wanna look big.

I miss him man.

It was so humiliating and all the actors [chuckles]

whenever I'd walk on set would just start laughing

at me 'cause they were in their cool

superhero costumes and I'm wearing this ridiculous pajamas

that made me look like a Chinese checkerboard.

There was even one point where I catch Downey,

Hulk catches Downey, puts them on the ground right

and I decide I'm gonna do this Hulk roar over him

in my little leotard.

[Hulk roaring]

What the hell?

And he just kind of has [chuckles],

he has his eyes closed, and he opens one eye

and he's just like, Really Ruffalo?

That's what you're going with.

And that's what it's always been like.

In the last movie he came up to me and he said,

I have a lot of compassion for you.

And I was like why?

He's like, 'Cause I see how hard it is for you

to stand around in that costume all day.

[upbeat music]

Foxcatcher.

That thing had been around for a long time

and I kept asking to be seen for it,

because I was a wrestler.

And it was six months of wrestling

and working out and putting on 40 pounds, really grueling.

And all the wrestling you see in there is us wrestling.

And I had another real character.

Although he was, he wasn't alive.

But his family really opened themselves to me.

I really got to know Dave Schultz,

in a posthumous way.

Another great experience.

Channing Tatum, he's my bro.

We went through that experience together.

And, yeah, I'm really proud of that movie.

[upbeat music]

Spotlight.

Occasionally, you get movies that are just purely

for entertainment and you get movies

that are called forth from the culture.

In society we're having a conversation

about an important issue and Spotlight

was one of those things that Mike Rezendes,

another real life character, I spent weeks with him.

Again became really good friends with him.

Drank with him.

Ate with him, absorbed myself into that world

of The Washington Post at that particular time.

And the people who were the victims

of these priests molestation cases.

We need the full scope.

That's the only thing that will put an end to this.

Then let's take it up to Ben and let him decide.

We'll take it to Ben when I say it's time.

It's time Robbie!

It's time!

They knew and they let it happen to kids!

Okay, it could have been you!

It could have me!

It could have been any of us!

And that movie really sparked change in the world,

that's ongoing today.

A moment where you're in service of something

that's important that people needed to know about,

and that you can do with cinema,

in a way you can't do in any other form.

[upbeat music]

Dark Waters.

Yeah, I'm an activist.

I've been an activist, probably since the Iraq War,

it was when I kind of really got into it.

I began to see how powerful films were

and films could be in that space in a way

that you can't do as an activist.

Because stories transcend all the political

and ideological divides that immediately come up

when you're an activist.

As time has gone on I've wanted to blend

more of my activism with actual storytelling.

And this article came up and I just saw

it was a place in the space

that I've already been working in which was water,

and this incredible story about this lawyer

who was part of the system himself,

who was a corporate defense attorney

who was completely indoctrinated in that culture,

believed that corporations were people,

that corporations could self-regulate

that the government shouldn't have really

much to do with that regulation.

And he went through this experience

that he realized that, that whole idea

was a fallacy and a lie.

They want to show the world it's no use fighting.

Look everybody, even he can't crack the maze

and he's helped build it.

The system is rigged.

They want us to think it will protect us but that's a lie.

We protect us, we do.

I reached out to him.

I talked to him and his wife,

and I immediately fell in love with them and thought,

this has never been done quite like this

from this point of view.

And he's so antithetical to what a hero is,

to like the Hulk, our other superheroes.

It spoke about a story that transcended

all the political ideology.

When we're so divided right now,

I just felt like storytelling is a way

to unite people around these really big discussions

that we have to have in order

to make our world a better place.

And so that was my draw to play Robert Bilott

and take control of what I'm doing, going forward.

A big part of choosing a role for me is like,

does it challenge me?

Does it break me up?

Does it does it push me into places

that I never been before

that scares the [beep] out of me?

Is it a story or a person that expresses some dimension

of my beliefs or my feelings

and lastly is it something

that can actually add to

or facilitate or even even bring forth the conversation

that needs to happen.

I believe that the culture actually

calls the movie forward

at a particular moment in time,

when we're having a discussion

that is somehow encapsulated in that project.