Mark Ruffalo, as normal a bloke as you could hope to meet on Planet Hollywood, is as comfortable talking about tomato farming or his family as he is about the Iraq war or his latest film – the splendid dramedy The Kids Are All Right, since you ask. He pours tea for TARA BRADY
UNSHAVEN and smiling warmly from under a baseball cap, you’d never imagine Mark Ruffalo was in showbusiness if you just happened upon him on the street. In dialogue, too, he chats amiably about small commonplace details. He’s fiercely proud of this year’s tomato crop; his nine-year-old son Keen is a great big brother to younger sisters Bella Noche and Odette; his ancestors hail from Calabria, Italy.
“My wife and I keep talking about doing the whole Italian odyssey to see if we can find any Ruffalos out there,” he says. “I keep hoping someone will see my name on a movie and call me up: ‘You’re one of us. Come on home’.”
Ask all the questions you want, interviewing Mark Ruffalo is awfully like having a regular conversation. He maintains eye contact. He laughs a lot. He offers tea like we’re labourers on a break, not film folk holed up in a swish hotel.
Jesus, you think, how on Earth does this guy get around in a phoney place like Hollywood? As it happens, he doesn’t. Three years ago, Ruffalo and family relocated to Sullivan County in upstate New York, where they quickly found grassroots causes to champion.
“We’re way up in the Catskills, 2½ hours northwest of New York,” he says. “It’s all farming and farmers. I have a vegetable patch. That’s as far as I’ve got so far. But I’m a great fan of farmers. They’re a dying breed. So we’ve started a little charity around the idea that people with a lot of land can lease it to younger farmers. It’s impossible to buy land and get started otherwise. You just can’t get a mortgage for it. In the meantime, American food continues to taste like shit. I pick up any piece of fruit in London and I can’t believe how it tastes. For one thing, it has a taste.”
Long cherished by the indie-schmindie Sundance set for a series of very fine, very vulnerable performances in films such as You Can Count on Meand XX/XY, Mark Ruffalo, like his hippie chums, has made a remarkable transition into the mainstream while maintaining his street cred.
Other stars, having chalked up anything like his successes with David Fincher's Zodiacand Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, might be expected to buy a boat; Ruffalo moves to the sticks and starts working toward self- sufficiency. Other stars make pledges and pleas on behalf of the victims of high-profile natural disasters; Ruffalo devotes his time to hard sells like small farmers and speaking out against the 9/11 Commission and the use of hydrofracking on the Marcellus Shale. (It's something to do with extracting natural gas from rock formations, apparently.)
“Iraq was how it started for me,” he says. “I was always tacitly political, but when you’re a young actor trying to survive, your energy and instincts get poured into that. But you know I trained with Stella Adler, and that was always part of the deal. As an actor, you’re supposed to be politically aware. You’re supposed to be connected to the voice of the times and the people. You’re supposed to speak out. She used to say you should have to pay to go to church, and theatre should be free. It took the Bush administration and all the amoral things they did for me to really understand the value and importance of being politically engaged.”
But for all the graduates to have emerged from Adler’s school, few have bothered with “the voice and the times of the people” to the extent Ruffalo has.
“That’s because they have it all figured out,” he says. “After Vietnam they knew they had to shut down the voices of dissent coming out of Hollywood. And they also knew they didn’t have to go after them directly. There just needed to be the threat of a blacklist, not an actual blacklist. So the artistic voice of America was completely shut down. People were terrified. They shut down the Academy Awards press line the night before the invasion. Just to make sure these lefty liberal Hollyweird people couldn’t say anything against the inception of the war. And I’ll never forget it. The Independent Spirit press line stayed open but I got halfway down the line and some guy from CNN sticks his microphone in my face and says: ‘What do you think about the blacklist of actors who speak out against the war?’ Ask yourself – what the fuck is CNN doing asking actors about a blacklist? This was the first I heard about it.”
But surely this is precisely the sort of business lefty, liberal Hollywood loves to get upset about? “But they didn’t,” he says. “Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn – all the old reliables came out, and the rest of them shut up. They were scared. Behind closed doors they’d talk about the war or 9/11 but never in public. It was brilliantly done. Anyone who said anything was subjected to ridicule. Ask a simple question like ‘Should buildings really fall like that?’ about 9/11 and you’re a tin-hat-wearing conspiracy nut. There’s this constant tone about everything.
“Even now, after Obama trounced McCain, all we keep hearing is this ‘Let’s take back our country’ shit from a tiny Republican elite. That’s not what the mandate says. Like I’m involved with the gas drilling thing at the minute, and people’s automatic response is: ‘Aren’t you worried this will hurt your career?’ and I say ‘but I was right to speak out against the war, and I’m right now’. Even when people choose to ignore the truth, in the end it resonates with them.”
Away from his political concerns and away from his sterling work as a proper actor, Ruffalo has always been happy to let his trademark curls down with the odd romantic comedy and films that, well, make pots of money. His latest box-office success, the splendid domestic dramedy The Kids Are All Right, features bright young things Mia Wasikowska (Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland) and Josh Hutcherson ( Bridge to Terabithia) as children of happy lesbian couple Annette Bening and Julianne Moore.
As the film kicks off the youngsters are searching out the anonymous sperm donor who fathered them. He, it transpires, is a freewheeling neo-hippie with a motorbike, an organic food co-operative, and no responsibilities whatsoever. He is played by Ruffalo. Bening – the uptight, hard-ass mom in the gang – takes an instant dislike to this interloper. Moore, the screw-up mom on the verge of a midlife crisis, is, on the other hand, immediately drawn to his loose-limbed charms.
“I loved the fact that the film very quickly stops being about a lesbian family and becomes a film about any family,” says Ruffalo. “And I felt for the character. That man never had to beg a woman for anything. Everything has been handed to him on a plate. He has this completely deluded fantasy that he’s going to show up and fit right into the family. He’s probably always got everything that way. Just by showing up.”
Though weightier than some of Ruffalo’s previous outings – 13 Going on 30, Just Like Heaven – The Kids Are All Right is the latest in a series of appearances as dashing romantic leads. It is, I suggest, unusual for an actor to work both the romcom sector and the nooks and crannies likely to produce such Ruffalo vehicles as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Blindness.
“It is, but it shouldn’t be,” he laughs. “Films shouldn’t be gendered. Those classic Hollywood films juggled all kinds of tones. I’ve always gone after the roles that match my own sensibilities – one foot in the grave and another on a banana skin.”
You have to feel thrilled for Mark Ruffalo. A natural born thespian, he was happy to wait tables and keep bar for the nine years he spent as a jobbing actor. Even after his big break under the playwright Kenneth Lonergan, there were crippling frustrations to contend with.
In 2002, just as he had Hollywood a- courting on the back of his work in Ride with the Devil and You Can Count on Me, the actor was diagnosed with an acoustic neuroma, a type of brain tumour. (He has since made a full recovery but not before he lost out on a major role in M Night Shyamalan's Signs.) Two years ago, again on the verge of A-list greatness, he retired from the profession for 12 months following an accidental shooting involving his hairdresser brother Scott. The event inspired a flurry of tawdry speculation in the tabloids, who cited everything from Russian roulette to Saudi cover-ups.
Today the 40-year-old seems to have come through it all with good humour intact. His career is once again flourishing – Scorsese, people – and he recently made his directorial debut with Sympathy for Delicious,winner of the Special Jury Prize at Sundance.
“I’m a very, very, very lucky guy” he says. “And I’ve got the heirloom tomato crop to prove it.”
Political players Hollywood and power
PLAY IT AGAIN, UNCLE SAM
Mark Ruffalo is far from the first Hollywood personality to weave politics into his life and work. In the 1950s, 10 of the industry’s most prominent talents stood up to the House Committee on Un-American Activities – then investigating supposed communists – by appearing in a short film called The Hollywood Ten. Writers such as Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner jnr denounced the committee’s actions and, as a result, suffered lengthy blacklisting. Humphrey Bogart initially organised a delegation in support of the 10, but later distanced himself from the group when pressure from the red-hunters increased.
THE REDDISH ’60S
It wasn’t until the 1960s that mainstream actors really began waving the red (or reddish) flag in serious numbers. Jane Fonda went to Hanoi. Warren Beatty was an adviser on liberal presidential candidate George McGovern’s campaign.
MODERN ERA
In contemporary Hollywood, it is commonplace for movie stars to incorporate campaign statements into their awards acceptance speeches. Tim Robbins shouts out for Ralph Nader and makes political satires such as Bob Roberts. Natalie Portman does sterling work for the vegan movement and animal rights in general. Ed Asner has been shouting about labour issues since Nixon was in the White House.
“I can’t turn on my television without hearing Janeane Garofalo tell me she is being silenced,” South Park’s Matt Stone said a few years ago.
AND ON THE RIGHT...
So, does Hollywood only ever incline to the left? Not quite. The upcoming midterm elections have seen a small cadre of Hollywood Republicans make their feelings known. Gary Sinise, James Woods and Kelsey Grammer have all stood up for the GOP. “I love George Bush right now and I always have. I’m the only guy in LA who voted for him,” Woods said in 2004.
