The Avengers

Oscars 2011: Mark Ruffalo interview

He’s endured tumours, paralysis and the terrible loss of a brother: meet Mark Ruffalo, survivor extraordinaire and Oscar-nominated star of ’The Kids Are All Right’.

"Just think,” a friend of Mark Ruffalo’s told him excitedly, after he’d been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his part in The Kids Are All Right. “You’ll never be a B-list actor again!”

There may well be something in this. After more than 20 years of being one of those recognisable faces whose name hovers elusively on the tip of people’s tongues, life may be about to change for Mark Ruffalo.

Yet in many ways getting an Oscar nomination is one of the least interesting things to happen to him. Not when you put it alongside the brain tumour, the paralysis and the family tragedy that led him to quit Hollywood. And then, when there seemed to be tranquillity in his life, he found himself accused of being a terrorist.

At one point in our conversation, Ruffalo refers to his having been scarred by experience. This isn’t said bitterly, or with any self-pity; it’s just that he’s led a pretty bizarre life and it’s left its mark.

On the outside, though, you’d never guess anything had gone amiss. At 43, his tousled black hair may have a few grey sprigs, but his face hasn’t lost its youthfulness and nor has his manner. Sitting in Claridges restaurant dressed in a sweatshirt, forking slices of papaya into his mouth, he looks like he belongs on a different planet to the rest of the guests.

Tonight, when Ruffalo takes his place in the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood for the Oscar ceremony, there won’t be a carefully crafted acceptance speech in the pocket of his tuxedo. Partly this is because he doesn’t think he’s going to win – “I’m sure it’ll be Christian Bale or Geoffrey Rush” – and partly because the nominees have been told they mustn’t take anything out of their pockets.

“We’ve already had this training course. When they told us that, it made me want to take this huge, map-sized piece of paper out, just to see what happened. I’m determined to enjoy it. After all, it’s taken me a long time to get to this place and, who knows, it may never happen again.”

Two years ago, Ruffalo was burned out, disillusioned and maddened by grief. In December 2008, his brother Scott, a hairstylist, was found shot dead in his Beverly Hills apartment. At first, the police suspected suicide and suggested he had been playing Russian roulette. Later, they decided Scott had been murdered; although two arrests were made, no one has ever been charged.

This was the last and the most savage in a series of blows for Ruffalo. “I thought I’d run the gamut as far as what I wanted to do as an actor,” he says. “I was disillusioned with Hollywood and the way it operates. I was finding it tough financially. The price of living in LA kept going up and my options as an actor felt as if they were getting smaller and smaller.

“I’d never taken a job purely for money – I felt that would kill me – but I was afraid that I was heading that way. Then my brother passing away was the final thing that kicked me over. It reminded me that life is short and you’d better do what you want while you have a chance.”

Ruffalo got rid of his agent, his publicist and all the trappings of his LA life. Then he sold his apartment and moved to upstate New York with his wife, the actress Sunrise Coigney, and their three young children. “Looking back, I think there was a little grief-driven madness in what I did. They say you’re not supposed to make any major decisions while you are grieving but I did the opposite.”

They settled in a remote spot where, he says, his nearest neighbours are farmers or tradespeople. “They don’t care about showbusiness or Hollywood. Not one person there has come up to me and said: ‘My God, you have an Oscar nomination!’ I really like that. I think it’s good for me and for my kids to be separated from everything I found so… well, repugnant.”

Yet there were some things he couldn’t cut himself off from. When his brother died, Ruffalo was in pre-production on his first film as a director. This was Sympathy for Delicious, which starred his friend Christopher Thornton as a paraplegic disc jockey – Thornton himself is a paraplegic as a result of a climbing accident.

“I think I was in a state of shock for most of the movie [it went on to win the Special Jury Prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival]. It wasn’t until I lived through a winter in upstate New York where it was all blanketed with snow and there was nothing but time, that I started coming to terms with what had happened.”

When Ruffalo grins, his face lights up in a way that seems unclouded by guile or suspicion. But when he looks intense, as he does now, there’s something vulnerable, almost beseeching about his expression, as if he’s still casting about for explanations that he knows will never be forthcoming. “I’d always been close to my brother. Very close. There were… well, there were a lot of things I needed to work through.”

And then one day the script for The Kids Are All Right landed on his doorstep. Idly, with no thought of doing it, Ruffalo leafed through the pages. Then he began to read more closely. “It was,” he says, “simply a terrific piece of work.”

He liked the idea – the children of a lesbian couple contact the sperm donor who fathered them 18 years earlier. He liked the part – the sperm donor, one of those charming, feckless people who go through life in thrall to their instincts. And he liked the fact it was only going to be six days’ work. So, without thinking too much, he said yes.

But by doing so wasn’t he returning to a lifestyle that he had shunned? “Well,” he says, “you have to remember that for more than half my life – probably until my children were born – acting was everything to me. I was obsessed by it and I spent so much time just trying to get to the point where I was being paid to do it. Literally, I spent every waking moment thinking about acting. But when I did The Kids Are All Right, somehow everything changed. Acting didn’t have the same importance as before. As a result, I felt much freer.”

He pauses and then gazes over the rim of his teacup. “I’ve never said this to anyone before, but I played the part as an homage to my brother. I knew as soon as I read it that I could do it in such a way as to celebrate the best of him. He had the same kind of openness as ‘Paul’. He was very open with his sexuality and accepting of his own shortcomings, and women adored him. He was just a fantastically beautiful fun guy. And it was a joy to do.

“For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel any pressure. It was just like starting over again.”

Remarkably, this wasn’t the first time that Ruffalo had remade himself from scratch. He’d been here – or somewhere like it – before. In 2000, he had appeared as Laura Linney’s brother in the Oscar-nominated You Can Count on Me. This, everyone told him, was his big break, one of those career-defining performances. “I had a lot of momentum after that. It was that moment where you break out, where whatever you do next makes or breaks you.”

What Ruffalo did next was wake up in the middle of the night having dreamt he had a brain tumour. The next day he went to the doctor and was sent for tests. The tests revealed he did have a brain tumour. Although the tumour was non-malignant, the operation to remove it left one side of his face paralysed.

“I was like that for about 10 months and the likelihood of it ever getting better looked pretty remote. The chances of the nerves coming back diminish each month and month seven was pretty much the cut-off point. But finally the paralysis did start to go. In all, I disappeared for a year.

“There were all kinds of rumours about what had happened to me – drugs, alcoholism, Aids. Whatever the truth, I was damaged goods, I mean, no one is going to hire an actor with half a paralysed face.”

By the time the paralysis had gone, so had Ruffalo’s momentum. “When you have someone tinkering around in your head, you have no idea what the effects might be. I didn’t even know if I had the ability to act anymore.

“I did a small film [My Life Without Me] and then [director] Jane Campion wanted to meet me. When I saw her, I’d been on steroids so I’d put on about 40lb and the left side of my face wasn’t completely back. By then I was so low and raw that I wasn’t going to lick anyone’s a— to get a part. I even argued with Jane about the part at the audition, which would have put some people off, but I think she admired it.”

In the Cut, co-starring Meg Ryan, “gained a certain following”, as they say – that is, it was a flop – but, as Ruffalo says: “It reminded people that I could still act. I felt as if I had made it back to the top of the precipice. I may have been hanging by my finger nails, but I was there.”

Various decent roles followed – in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Collateral and Zodiac – before Ruffalo disappeared off the map again. But since finishing The Kids Are All Right, he’s been in Shutter Island and in May he starts shooting The Avengers, playing the Incredible Hulk.

Given that Ruffalo is slim, shortish and seemingly untroubled by anger issues, this is either very bold or very batty casting. Ruffalo isn’t sure himself, although he’s excited. The Avengers will be shot using a technique called “motion capture” whereby he’ll be digitally transformed into the Hulk at the same time as playing him.

“There’s this algorithm that digitally puts 2,000lbs of muscle onto my body. It’s weird. I wear this skinny little suit with reflective balls all over it,” he says. “When we shot the stuff, I was actually standing in a warehouse with a couple of cardboard boxes and some foam mats. But when I looked at the monitor there I was as the Hulk in this landscape with cars and boulders and hills.”

If Ruffalo is looking for some anger to tap into when playing the Hulk, he can always recall his feelings on seeing television news reports last year that he’d been put on the US Terrorist Advisory List. What had actually happened was that he’d been involved with a documentary about gas drilling in New York state that had attracted the attention of the Department of Homeland Security.

“Somehow this story came out about my being on this terrorist list. Fox News picked it up and bundled it together with my brother’s murder to make it sound as ominous as possible. Then every news organisation in the country ran it without bothering to check if it was true. It wasn’t until The Washington Times finally nailed the story that it went away.”

The Avengers is being shot in New Mexico and Ruffalo will be there for four months. But for the moment, life is relatively quiet in the Ruffalo household, even if it’s frenetic whenever he steps outside.

Opposite Claridges, paparazzi gather. “I never used to get photographed and people asking for autographs. I don’t mind the autographs, but the paparazzi I find weird. As an actor you want to be able to regard the world, instead of having it regard you.

“But some things never change. If I walk round the house saying: ‘Hey, I’m no longer a B actor!’, do you think that means anything to my kids? Of course not. They just give me this funny look and go: ‘Yeah, yeah, we want our breakfast.’"

The Kids Are All Right is available on DVD from March 21