“It’s definitely not a safe role”: the 2014 movie that put Mark Ruffalo’s “ass on the line”
It seemed that for a long time, Mark Ruffalo was a great actor who Hollywood wasn’t sure what to do with. His breakout performance in Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count On Me felt like a revelation, but he still spent the better part of a decade doing generic romantic comedy roles.
Although he suffered from a serious illness that prevented him from pursuing some opportunities, Ruffalo did manage to start nailing smaller roles in major critical successes, such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Collateral. Eventually, he finally received the respect that he deserved from the industry when his heartfelt performance in The Kids Are All Right earned him an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, but the most significant moment of Ruffalo’s career happened when he signed on to play Bruce Banner, the scientist who becomes The Incredible Hulk, in The Avengers.
Although Edward Norton had portrayed the same in The Incredible Hulk, he had notable creative feuds with Marvel Studios, prompting a recast. There was a fair amount of scepticism going in, as both Ang Lee’s Hulk and Marvel Studios’ The Incredible Hulk had been disappointments that suggested that the character just might not work on the big screen, but Ruffalo knocked his performance out of the park and became a fundamental part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe moving forward.
Although getting to be part of the MCU is an exciting opportunity for any actor, it can also be a time-consuming commitment that prevents them from getting to work on passion projects; for example, Robert Downey Jr rarely did any non-Marvel roles in between making the original Iron Man and Avengers: Endgame, with a few outliers like The Judge that were critical disappointments. However, Ruffalo was able to consistently take the time to work on smaller projects that allowed him to show his range.
It was only a year after he had made a cameo at the end of Iron Man 3 as Banner that he starred in Infinitely Polar Bear, a dramedy where he plays a father dealing with being bipolar, and given the sensitivity required to play someone with this condition, Ruffalo said that his performance was one of the most challenging of his entire career.
“My ass is on the line a little bit,” Ruffalo told Collider, “It’s definitely not a safe role and then it’s Maya’s father, which has its own responsibility. But I felt like I loved the character even in spite of his bipolar, I loved that character. I saw a place I could really do a lot of different things in a course of one film. There’s humour, there’s pathos, there’s scary stuff, there’s light beautiful stuff. And underneath it all is really just a sense of love for this family and the way they dealt with him and the way he dealt with them.”
Ruffalo had developed a strong relationship with the film’s director, Maya Forbes, and said that he was proud of how Infinitely Polar Bear turned out.
“It’s a movie that I’ve been trying to get made with Maya for three years, and it just so happened to finally get financing right at this particular moment,” he explained. “It’s something that in a lot of ways, I’ve already been working on in my mind, and very excited to see finally come together. When we got into it, yeah, it’s scary. It’s not easy material.”
While Infinitely Polar Bear certainly wasn’t a sensation, Ruffalo’s performance was very acclaimed in what became one of the best years of his career. Also in 2014, he earned an Emmy for ‘Best Actor in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television’ for his role in The Normal Heart, and received an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for his turn in Foxcatcher.
