Mark Ruffalo

Mark Alan Ruffalo is a U.S. actor, director, producer and screenwriter. He has portrayed the Marvel Comics character Dr. Bruce Banner / the Hulk in The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron

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Born: November 22, 1967 (age 47), Kenosha, Wisconsin, United States

Height: 1.73 m

Spouse: Sunrise Coigney (m. 2000)

Awards: MTV Movie Award for Best Fight, more

Siblings: Scott Ruffalo, Tania Ruffalo, Nicole Ruffalo

Mark Alan Ruffalo (born November 22, 1967) is a U.S. actor, director, producer and screenwriter. He has portrayed the Marvel Comics character Dr. Bruce Banner / the Hulk in The Avengers (2012) and 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 a Screen Actors Guild Award and received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie nomination for The Normal Heart, which he also produced.

In 2010, Ruffalo claimed he had been placed on a terror advisory list after organizing screenings for the documentary GasLand about fracking. The Department of Homeland Security denied that it had him on any such list.

Early life

Ruffalo was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His 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 (died 2008). He is of Italian and French Canadian descent. He described 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." Ruffalo was raised Catholic and attended both Catholic school and progressive[clarification needed] schools.

Ruffalo has described himself as having been a "happy kid," although he struggled from undiagnosed dyslexia and ADD as a child and a young adult.

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, California, and later to Los Angeles, where he took classes at the Stella Adler Conservatory and co-founded the Orpheus Theatre Company. With the Orpheus Theatre Company, he wrote, directed, and starred in a number of plays, and spent the next nine years working 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, he 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 character's brother in Lonergan's 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 (2003), Jane Campion's In the Cut (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 crime-thriller Collateral (2004).

In the mid 2000s, Ruffalo appeared as a romantic lead 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' 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.

Ruffalo at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival

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. His performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Ruffalo starred in The Avengers (2012), the sixth installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, replacing Edward Norton as Dr. Bruce Banner / the Hulk. Ruffalo received critical acclaim for his performance and is under contract to reprise the role in any future film appearances of the character produced by Marvel Studios. Ruffalo also made an uncredited cameo appearance as Banner in Iron Man 3, making him the first actor to reprise the character in a live-action film. He reprised the role again in Avengers: Age of Ultron (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." About 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.