Whether it's a blockbuster or an indie slow-burner, Mark Ruffalo believes in bringing the same principles and work ethic to every film. He talks to Dominic Corry.
Few Hollywood A-listers move between big and small movies with the ease of double Oscar-nominee Mark Ruffalo. Before turning green and angry to battle an army of killer robots as the Hulk in next month's hotly anticipated Avengers sequel Age of Ultron, he can be seen in the new JJ Abrams-produced domestic dramedy Infinitely Polar Bear.
In a casually raw performance that recalls his early breakout roles, Ruffalo plays Cam, a man suffering from bipolar disorder who must pull himself together to raise his two young daughters when his estranged wife (Zoe Saldana) heads off to business school.
The 70s-set film is based on the childhood experiences of its writer/director Maya Forbes, and it was her gently comedic take on what most films treat as pretty heavy subject matter that attracted Ruffalo, as the actor told TimeOut recently.
"Cam was committed to his family and I think that is what carries us through the more difficult times in the movie but also in our lives with people who are mentally ill.
There's a lot of people who are dealing with psychological disabilities or mental illness and they have families and friends and people who love them.
"So a good way to broach what is a scary subject for a lot of people was with a lot of heart, a lot of honesty and a lot of humour and love. That was exciting to me and I think Maya does a really wonderful job and that's what makes it relatable and watchable ultimately."
Although Ruffalo had prior experience with bipolar disorder through members of his family, the film challenged some of his presumptions regarding the illness.
"As I started to work on it and hear about it and live in it, I realised some of the very things that made Cam not such a great father produced great kids.
"His inability to always be the parent in the room made his kids have to take on more responsibility or be more thoughtful about their choices. And in the difficulty of what Cam was struggling against, they also received a lot of positive things as well -- these people went on to have really beautiful, loving lives and relationships.
"And so it's easy to see them and think 'Oh man, what a tough life, what bad luck for them', but the fact of the matter is, not one of those family members would say 'I wish he wasn't like that'.
"That was probably the most significant thing I learned about mental illness -- that maybe these things aren't as horrible as we want to think they are. There's actually a gift in our interactions with these kind of people, as well as the difficult parts."
Ruffalo's first Oscar nomination was for 2010's The Kids Are Alright, which also celebrated a non-traditional family. Hollywood's lack of diversity in this area is a topic that inspires passion in the actor. "The more we learn about real families, the more it challenges those assumptions about tradition. The more we move forward progressively in the world, and look at the world through a progressive lens, the more those assumptions that the media or ideological groups want to tell us is a traditional family, is really not true. All families are quirky, all families are weird."
Watch the trailer for Infinitely Polar Bear here:
A lot of actors talk about doing 'one for them and one for me' when it comes to balancing personal work with blockbusters. But Ruffalo doesn't see it that way.
"I think that unless you bring your principles and your work ethic to each part in the same measure, you can get yourself into trouble. You can hurt yourself and your relationship to your work. Because I'm ADHD, I get very bored of the same kind of thing so I really like to challenge myself and challenge people's assumptions about me and my work and keep it interesting and diverse for me." So he has same approach on the sets of both a tiny film like Infinitely Polar Bear and Avengers: Age of Ultron, arguably the biggest film ever made?
"Yeah definitely. They're totally different characters. And you're being asked to draw upon different parts of your experience as an actor and the way you work, but ultimately you're doing the same thing -- you're listening, you're spotting, you're trying to be honest in the moment. You just have to do it quicker when it's little, with less comfort. I like the nature of that kind of filmmaking. It has an immediacy to it that a bigger film over a longer period of time sort of loses."
Although the comment is potentially in poor taste, Ruffalo's disarmingly frank conversational style leads TimeOut to inquire how having played a bipolar character will inform his portrayal of the Hulk.
"Well isn't the Hulk bipolar? Isn't it said that he's the mythological manifestation of that very same thing?" is Ruffalo's good-natured response.
