The most “humiliating” role of Mark Ruffalo’s career: “I hated it”
One acclaimed TV show that might have passed you by recently was Task, starring Mark Ruffalo, and it is well worth catching. An FBI thriller with the veteran actor leading the way as a grizzled, alcoholic agent hunting down local gangsters, it won several award nominations last year, including a Golden Globe nod for Ruffalo.
It was well deserved, because he is as good as you might expect as the troubled priest-turned detective, given an extra six hours or so to shape the character over what he usually gets in the runtime of a movie. Not that he struggles with that either, given he has shown across more than 20 years that he’s one of the best in the business.
While the young-uns will most likely know him as the chonky green car-flinger Hulk from the Avengers movies, Ruffalo has been putting in award-winning shifts across genres and building up a frankly enviable roster of top-class films, chief among which have to be 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and 2007’s massively overlooked David Fincher serial killer thriller Zodiac.
Alongside Robert Downey Jr and Jake Gyllenhaal, Ruffalo was magnificent as San Francisco PD homicide Detective Dave Toschi in a superb movie that barely broke even at the box office but should have made a fortune. In the end, Ruffalo had to wait until 2010 to start to get some recognition for the quality of work he was putting in, with 2010’s indie drama The Kids Are Alright bagging him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
There was no looking back after that, though, with Ruffalo repeating the trick over the next decade with another three Oscar shouts following for wrestling drama Foxcatcher, 2015’s Spotlight, and then Yorgos Lanthimos’ spectacular fantasy Poor Things opposite Emma Stone in 2023.
But ironically, it was probably his most visible role (literally) that he enjoyed making the least, as The Hulk, the part that required hours of make-up and prosthetics and weeks of motion capture acting, leading Ruffalo to recall to radio station NPR: “I hated it”.
Elaborating, “It’s the man-canceling suit…it makes you look big everywhere you want to look small and small everywhere you want to look big, you know? It’s just like – it’s the most humiliating thing in the world.”
Ruffalo had to endure turning himself into The Hulk on four different occasions for the various Avengers movies between 2012 and 2019, in addition to an appearance on the Disney spin-off She Hulk: Attorney at Law in 2022. None of which were particularly edifying experiences for him due to the outfit, as he explained: “(I) had a little loincloth made for it at one point as the years went on, because it’s just so not modest… You know, as an actor, you learn to love a costume. You learn to hide behind props”.
“But when you’re in green screen and it’s just you and you’re naked, and it’s all your imagination, you have to put things there that aren’t there. You have to play off people that aren’t there. You have to use props that aren’t there.”
Although he’s listed to appear as Hulk in the upcoming Spider-Man movie Brand New Day later this year, there remain conflicting reports as to whether or not he will be back for the end-of-year Avengers blow-out, Doomsday. Currently, it seems he is not going to be in the movie, but might be in the second sequel, Secret Wars, due out in 2027.
