Mark Alan Ruffalo (born November 22, 1967) is an American actor, director, producer and screenwriter. He portrayed the Marvel Comics character, Bruce Banner / The Hulk in The Avengers (2012), and will reprise his role in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). Other notable films in which he has starred or co-starred are You Can Count on Me (2000), Collateral (2004), 13 Going on 30 (2004), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Just Like Heaven (2005), Zodiac (2007), Shutter Island (2010), Now You See Me (2013), and Begin Again (2013). For his roles in The Kids Are All Right (2010) and Foxcatcher (2014), he received Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor. He also won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie and received an Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie nomination for The Normal Heart (2014).
Ruffalo is a supporter of the 9/11 Truth movement and advocates for the creation of 100% clean energy (including a campaign to "Put Solar On It" and various anti-fracking groups including Artists Against Fracking). He is a supporter of the Solutions Project and the 100% Campaign, which advocates for 100% clean energy for 100% of the people.
In 2010, Ruffalo claimed he had been placed on a terror advisory list after organizing screenings for the documentary GasLand about fracking However, the Department of Homeland Security denied that they had him on any such list.
Early life
Ruffalo was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Ruffalo's mother, Marie Rose (née Hebert), is a hairdresser and stylist, and his father, Frank Lawrence Ruffalo, Jr., worked as a construction painter. He has two sisters, Tania and Nicole, and a brother, Scott, who died in December 2008. His father was of Italian descent, while his mother is of half French Canadian and half Italian ancestry. Growing up, Mark's mother and most of the rest of his family were Catholic; his grandmother, who lived with the family, was an Evangelical Christian; and his father was a member of the Bahá'à Faith. Ruffalo was raised Roman Catholic; he attended both a Catholic and a progressive school.
Ruffalo has described himself as having been a "happy kid" and his upbringing as taking place in a "very big" family with "lots of love". Of his father, Ruffalo has said, "He was an amazing, charismatic guy who was city high school wrestling champion three times. He was away a lot when I was growing up. I was very lonely for him.â€
Ruffalo spent his teen years in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where his father worked. Ruffalo competed in wrestling in junior high and high school in Wisconsin and Virginia. He graduated from First Colonial High School, and then moved with his family to San Diego, and later to Los Angeles, California. There, he took classes at the Stella Adler Conservatory and co-founded the Orpheus Theatre Company. With the OTC, he wrote, directed, and starred in a number of plays, and spent the next nine years earning his money as a bartender.
Career
Acting
Ruffalo had minor roles in films like The Dentist (1996), the low-key crime comedy Safe Men (1998) and Ang Lee's Civil War Western Ride with the Devil (1999). Through a chance meeting with writer Kenneth Lonergan, Ruffalo began collaborating with Lonergan and appeared in several of his plays, including the original cast of This is Our Youth (1996), which led to Ruffalo's role as Laura Linney's troubled, aimless drifter brother Terry in Lonergan's acclaimed, Academy Award-nominated 2000 film You Can Count on Me. He received favorable reviews for his performance in this film, often earning comparisons to the young Marlon Brando, and won awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and Montreal World Film Festival.
This led to other significant roles, including the films XX/XY (2002), Isabel Coixet's My Life Without Me with Sarah Polley (2003), Jane Campion's In the Cut with Meg Ryan (2003), Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and We Don't Live Here Anymore (2004), which is based upon two short stories written by Andre Dubus. He appeared opposite Tom Cruise as a narcotics detective in Michael Mann's acclaimed crime-thriller Collateral (2004). More recently, Ruffalo has appeared as a romantic lead in "chick flicks" such as View From the Top (2002), 13 Going on 30 (2004), Just Like Heaven (2005) and Rumor Has It (2005). In 2006, Ruffalo starred in Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing! at the Belasco Theatre in New York, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play. In March 2007, he appeared in Zodiac as SFPD homicide inspector Dave Toschi, who ran the investigation to find and apprehend the Zodiac killer from 1969 through most of the 1970s. In 2007, Ruffalo played divorced lawyer Dwight Arno, who accidentally kills a child and speeds away, in Terry George's film Reservation Road, based on the novel by John Burnham Schwartz.
In 2008, Ruffalo starred as a con man in The Brothers Bloom with Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz and co-starred with Julianne Moore in Blindness. 2008 also saw Ruffalo in Brian Goodman's What Doesn't Kill You with Ethan Hawke and Amanda Peet, which was shown at the Toronto Film Festival. In 2009, he played a brief role in the film Where The Wild Things Are as Max's mother's boyfriend. In 2010, he co-starred in the Martin Scorsese thriller Shutter Island as U.S. Marshal Chuck Aule, the partner of Leonardo DiCaprio's character Teddy Daniels.
In 2010, he starred in Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, with Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. Ruffalo stated in an interview that he approached Cholodenko after watching High Art and said he would love to work with her. Years later, she called Ruffalo and said she wrote a script, and had him in mind for the part. The performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.
Ruffalo starred in the 2012 superhero film The Avengers, the sixth installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, replacing Edward Norton in the role of Bruce Banner / the Hulk. Ruffalo received critical acclaim for his performance and will reprise the role in any future film adaptations of the character produced by Marvel Studios. Ruffalo also made an uncredited cameo appearance as Bruce Banner in Iron Man 3, making him the first actor to reprise the role in a live-action movie. He will reprise the role again in Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015.
In 2014, Ruffalo starred as Ned Weeks in a television adaptation of Larry Kramer's AIDS-era play, The Normal Heart; his performance earned him an Emmy nomination. He says he has had an outpouring of support for his performance:
I’ve never had so sincere and vulnerable a response from people for anything that I’ve ever done. . . . And of everything that I’ve done since I’ve been on social media, which hasn’t been that long, by the way, I haven’t had such an overwhelmingly positive response as I have from The Normal Heart directly to me. And it’s a blessing, man. If this is it, if I have a piano dropped on me tomorrow, then I would go down thinking, 'You know what, I did okay as far as my career goes, because that’s a gift. That’s rare.'
Directing
He made his directorial debut with Sympathy for Delicious, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Special Jury Prize. On releasing the film, Ruffalo said, "I'm still looking for distribution. I have a couple offers on the table, but I'm holding out for something a little bigger. I've been screening it for a lot of groups, and people are really responding to it. I think they're scared of that movie." Of directing, he says, "I liken it to an actor gets to eat one slice, and a director gets to eat the whole pie. [laughs] You get to collaborate with gifted people who are good at their craft, so you're orchestrating all these different mediums. You're helping people through the script to realize their own talents. I find that really satisfying, and I felt like being in front of the camera is so intense and self-involved and personal, and directing isn't like that for me. It's a much more communal experience. Last year at this time, I was like, 'I'm not going back to acting, man. No way, it's done.' I haven't worked in a year. It's really taken me that long to get back to my love for what I do for acting. I would like to do 50-50, if I could. Really, I'd just be directing right now, but I can't support my family doing that at this moment, and I love acting. It's not a bad position to be in."
Personal life
Since June 2000, Ruffalo has been married to former French-American actress Sunrise Coigney (born Christina Sunrise Coigney on September 17, 1972 in San Francisco), and they have three children: a son Keen, born in 2001, and daughters Bella Noche, born in 2005, and Odette, born in 2007, in Los Angeles, California. The family now lives in New York City.
In 2002, Ruffalo was diagnosed with an acoustic neuroma, a type of brain tumor, and had surgery; the tumor was benign, but resulted in a period of partial facial paralysis. He fully recovered from the paralysis and returned to good health as well as an active life and movie career.
On December 1, 2008, Ruffalo's brother, Scott, was shot at his Beverly Hills condominium, with one report describing the shooting as "execution-style" in the back of the head. Scott died on December 8, 2008. Police took two people into custody: a woman who is considered a suspect and a man considered a "person of interest". One of the suspects reportedly told police that Scott Ruffalo shot himself while playing Russian roulette; the witnesses were later released as the police investigation continued. The female suspect later died of a purported drug overdose.
Political views
On October 4, 2006, he appeared on Democracy Now!, a daily news program. He spoke against the War in Iraq, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, torture, and the Bush Administration. He also announced he would speak at The World Can't Wait Protest in New York City on October 5, 2006. Ruffalo contributed to the campaign of former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel for the 2008 Democratic Party nomination for President.
He appeared on Penn & Teller: Bullshit! on August 14, 2008's episode entitled "World Peace". He said that "Peace looks like me and my kids and my wife laying in our bed on a Saturday morning... it's a love-in, y'know? John Lennon had it right, y'know?" In 2012, he endorsed Kathleen Kane, the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania Attorney General, due to her insistence on investigating the Jerry Sandusky scandal, hydrofracking and the Hershey Trust for alleged improprieties. Kane went on to become Pennsylvania's first woman Attorney General and Democrat elected to the post.
Ruffalo is pro-choice He has explained his stance by saying,"I don't want to turn back the hands of time to when women shuttled across state lines in the thick of night to resolve an unwanted pregnancy, in a cheap hotel room."
9/11 Truther
Ruffalo has given interviews to We Are Change, a 9/11 'truth' group, in both 2007 and 2011. Ruffalo stated: "I'm baffled by the way all three buildings came down. My first reaction was that buildings don't fall down like that. I've done quite a bit of my own research ...The fact that the 9/11 investigation went from the moment the planes hit to the moment the buildings fell, and nothing before or after, I think, makes that investigation completely illegitimate. If you're going to do a crime investigation, you have to find motive. We didn't follow that. It was quickly pushed away, obviously. There was no evidence at the biggest crime scene. None of us know what happened but I'm totally and completely behind reopening that investigation. Where is the money? Follow the money, guys!"
In 2011, he added: "The Commission didn't really do anything about before the buildings were struck or afterwards. There just seems to be more questions left unanswered than anything else. I don't want to jump to any conclusions but I don't think it's ever been given its due diligence, considering that it's the largest crime ever committed on US soil. Building Seven - a lot of people don't even know about that ... The world has changed because of it and not in a good way. We've been militarised and lost many of our civil liberties. More people die from smoking cigarettes each year and we give this a lot more play than that."
Opposition to fracking
In 2008, Ruffalo expressed concern that gas companies were eyeing his family's land in Callicoon, New York. After doing his own investigation, New York magazine wrote, he becomes "anti-fracking's first famous face." On October 4, 2010, Ruffalo appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show to discuss hydraulic fracturing and the The FRAC Act of 2009. He stated in the December 2010 issue of GQ magazine that after he organized screenings in Pennsylvania of a documentary about natural-gas-drilling called Gasland, he was placed on a terror advisory list. The Department of Homeland Security denied that they had him on a list.
On July 13, 2011, Ruffalo appeared on Countdown With Keith Olbermann to discuss fracking, particularly in New York. "This is an industry that is the dirtiest, slimiest, most arrogant, and negligent that you can imagine," he said. Ruffalo taped an "online segment extra" for Countdown, during which time Keith Olbermann offered him the opportunity to become an official Countdown Contributor. Ruffalo gratefully accepted.
He has appeared on The Colbert Report and Real Time with Bill Maher to discuss his continued opposition to fracking and to promote waterdefense.org. His neighbors with a family house near his in Callicoon, Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, decided to mobilize their friends around the anti-fracking cause, and in August 2012 Artists Against Fracking was launched with Ruffalo and the two heading it. Alec Baldwin is a member.
On April 25, 2013, Ruffalo laid out his full case against fracking in a piece co-authored with Phil Radford on CNN.com, where he argued solar and wind are here now, and using fracked natural gas instead of cleaner sources of energy will result in more faucets on fire, methane leaks that cause global warming, groundwater contamination, and cancer-causing chemicals in communities.
That same year, Ruffalo began promoting The Solutions Project along with Stanford professor Mark Jacobson and private equity investor Marco Krapels. The Solutions Project is presented as a way for the U.S. to generate 100% of its electricity from renewable energy by 2050.
Ruffalo is filming a documentary on the effects of major oil spill.
Israel and Operation Protective Edge
On 21 July 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, Mark Ruffalo blasted the IDF for targeting Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip as a Hamas base, causing anger among Israelis and pro-Israelis over his comments.
2014 Marina Silva controversy
On 29 September 2014, Mark Ruffalo withdrew his support to Brazilian president candidate Marina Silva because of the changes made by her party on the government program regarding LGBT cause, which wasn't clear about the position over this matter.
Filmography
Film
Television
Awards and nominations
References
External links
- Mark Ruffalo at the Internet Movie Database
- Mark Ruffalo at the Internet Broadway Database
- Mark Ruffalo at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
- People in Film: Mark Ruffalo at Focus Features
- Clips from Ruffalo interview on Inside the Actors Studio
- Mark Ruffalo Producer Profile for The 1 Second Film
- Mark Ruffalo Central
