When Mark Ruffalo encountered the dark side of Hollywood: “We don’t give a shit about Mark Ruffalo”
These days, Mark Ruffalo is one of the most in-demand actors in Hollywood.
He’ll forever be beloved by nerds everywhere for his role as Bruce Banner/The Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and he has used that mainstream cache to amass one of the most fascinating filmographies in the business. Now, it’s just as likely to see him embrace the off-kilter nature of a Yorgos Lanthimos movie or a Bong Joon-ho vehicle as it is to see him flex his dramatic muscles in Spotlight or Dark Waters.
However, Ruffalo’s career wasn’t always in this healthy place, and he’s been honest in interviews about how it took him a very long time to be viewed by Hollywood as someone who belonged in the upper echelon. The Wisconsin native began booking movie roles in the mid-1990s, but it took until 2004 for him to finally start gaining wider recognition thanks to his roles in three movies that all came out within months of each other: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 13 Going on 30, and Collateral.
Suddenly, the uniquely sensitive performer, who didn’t fit into the standard box of a stereotypical Hollywood leading man, began landing bigger and bigger roles. He tried being a romantic lead in Just Like Heaven and Rumour Has It; he played haunted real-life detective Dave Toschi in Zodiac; he starred alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island; and he picked up his first Academy Award nomination for 2010’s The Kids Aren’t Alright.
From the outside, it looked like Ruffalo had graduated to the rarified air of an actor who major studios sought out for their most prestigious films. However, when he spoke to High Snobiety in 2023, he admitted appearances can be deceptive. “Studios, they weren’t coming to me in that way,” Ruffalo mused, reflecting on the frustration of this period, which was perfectly encapsulated by one needlessly harsh negotiation.
According to Ruffalo, when his manager began drilling down into the finer points of his Zodiac contract, Paramount Pictures decided to let Ruffalo know exactly where he stood on the Hollywood totem pole. “I’ll never forget when they were negotiating my deal,” Ruffalo recalled with a wince, “The studio negotiator literally said to my manager, ‘Look, we don’t give a shit about Mark Ruffalo. We don’t even want Mark Ruffalo in this movie, so you’re going to take what we’re offering you or forget it’.”
On the one hand, Ruffalo was being offered a plum role as one of the three leads in a David Fincher picture, which is a huge deal for any actor. But, on the other hand, he couldn’t help feeling disheartened that the studio thought so little of him that they played hardball in such a cruel way. If he could work steadily for over a decade and still have studios act like they’re doing him a favour, instead of actively seeking him out, where did that leave his career?
To his credit, though, the actor resolved to accept the role and simply keep doing what he’d been doing, namely, making all kinds of movies and playing as many different kinds of roles as he could get his hands on. “What I felt immediately in the film world is, once you did one thing well, that’s what they think you are,” he explained. “They will just come to you with that part over and over again. And I was like, ‘No. My career is not going to be that. I’m going to do as much as I can to try and make people see me in different ways, so that I can do more over the years’.”
It’s a testament to Ruffalo’s conviction that this brush with the dark side of Hollywood actually ended up helping him forge the career that now gives him the freedom to do almost anything he wants. Would he be able to make a harrowing HBO drama like I Know This Much Is True, a superhero movie like Avengers: Endgame, and an oddball Oscar-nominated dark comedy-drama like Poor Things within a couple of years if he hadn’t proved his versatility over and over again during that dim period? It’s hard to say for certain, but I’d argue it’s highly unlikely.
