Mark Ruffalo appears on the May cover of DETAILS magazine in a photo shoot with Matthias Vriens-McGrath that took place in New York City. Disgusted with Hollywood and mourning the loss of his brother, Ruffalo quit acting (again) for his hideaway in upstate New York. But a funny thing happened on the way to irrelevance—the movie he thought would be his last earned him an Oscar nomination and made him a bona fide leading man. Now the 43-year-old in-demand actor is making his long-awaited directorial debut with this month’s Sympathy for Delicious and suiting up to be the next Hulk. Strange how busy retirement can be. “You don’t interview Mark Ruffalo—you converse with him,” said writer Jonathan Miles. “The standard Hollywood ego is nowhere to be found. By the end of the interview we were just talking fishing and politics like every other guy in the bar.”
Highlights from the article:
On quitting acting in 2009: “I’d had it with L.A., and I really had it with the business side of acting, the machinery of it all. You’re an artist, but then all of a sudden you’re a product at the same time, and there’s this company that’s sprung up around you. I got depressed. I was losing my love for it. So I said, ‘I’m done.’ I fired everybody and moved my family out here (Callicoon, NY). I had to make a radical move.” He goes on to say, “The Kids Are Alright was my swan song. I didn’t know what I was doing next.”
On struggling to make it as an actor: “It was brutal. The years are stripping away, but when you talking to anyone from home, you’re saying something like ‘Well, I’m just working on my craft right now,’ when the truth is that I can’t get a fucking job because no one will hire me. It was humiliating.”
On deciding to continue acting: What brought Ruffalo back this latest time was sitting in the audience at Sundance, where The Kids Are Alright made its debut in 2010, and, after the first peal of laughter, “watching everyone’s jaded, supercool Hollywood identities melt into the communal experience of filmmaking and storytelling. It reminded me: I’m an actor, and my whole life has been geared towards being an actor.”
On acting in The Avengers, a computer-generated style movie: Ruffalo makes the counterintuitive connection between motion-capture acting and the theater. “It’s the absolute perfect marriage because it relies on your imagination, your ability to project outside of yourself, to be the watcher and the watched. A stage actor has to be able to do that, because you’re telling the story with your body as much as your face and voice.”
On not training to be The Incredible Hulk: “No, no, no. Look, I’m eating guacamole and potato chips….You think Tom Cruise does this?”
I’ve always had the hugest crush on Mark Ruffalo. I just love him! His performance in The Kids Are Alright was amazing, and I’m glad he’s back to acting. Can’t wait to see him as the Hulk!
Full article here and behind-the-scenes video here!
Posted Friday, April 15th, 2011 at 9:09am
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