Mark Ruffalo

Mark Ruffalo (born November 22, 1967, Kenosha, Wisconsin, U.S.) is an American actor who was a compelling performer in critically acclaimed movies and plays, though he is perhaps more widely known for portraying Bruce Banner/the Hulk in a series of superhero movies.

Ruffalo spent his early childhood in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where his father had a construction painting business and his mother worked as a hair stylist. When he was about 13, the family moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia. He participated in wrestling while in high school, and in his senior year he acted in a school performance of West Side Story. After his 1986 graduation, he moved with his family to San Diego, California. He later enrolled at the Stella Adler Academy of Acting & Theatre in Los Angeles. With some friends, he formed a theatre company, in which he wrote, directed, and acted, while supporting himself working as a bartender.

Ruffalo also sought screen roles. He was cast as a teenager for a sitcom about a blended family, but only the pilot was filmed (it aired as an episode of CBS Summer Playhouse in 1989). He started his movie career as a victim in such low-budget horror films as Mirror Mirror 2: Raven Dance (1994) and The Dentist (1996). After he met playwright, screenwriter, and director Kenneth Lonergan, however, his prospects improved, especially after Lonergan cast him in the lead role in his play This Is Our Youth, which opened Off-Broadway in 1996 and was revised and revived two years later. Ruffalo’s performance in both versions was well reviewed, and he began to get small parts in better movies, including Ang Lee’s Civil War movie Ride with the Devil (1999). For Lonergan’s first movie, he cast Ruffalo as the irresponsible brother who upends the narrow life of his sister (Laura Linney) in the acclaimed You Can Count on Me (2000), and this proved to be a breakthrough for Ruffalo.

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Ruffalo had supporting roles in The Last Castle (2001), about a rebellion in a military prison, and in John Woo’s World War II movie Windtalkers (2002), and he played leading parts in the dramas XX/XY (2002) and My Life Without Me (2003). He costarred with Meg Ryan in Jane Campion’s thriller In the Cut (2003) and took the part of a nerdy scientist in the hit movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Also in 2004 he was a police detective in another thriller, Collateral.

In 2006 Ruffalo made his Broadway debut, in Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing!. His performance earned him a nomination for a Tony Award. His primary focus remained the cinema, nonetheless. He was a police inspector in the well-received reality-based crime story Zodiac (2007) and a con man in the romantic comedy The Brothers Bloom (2008). In 2010 Ruffalo received a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival for his directorial debut, Sympathy for Delicious, about a paraplegic DJ who discovers that he has a talent for faith healing. In addition, his performance as the laid-back sperm donor who fathered the teenage children of a lesbian couple in The Kids Are All Right (2010) brought him an Academy Award nomination.

Ruffalo first appeared as Bruce Banner/the Hulk in The Avengers (2012), and he reprised the role in subsequent Marvel universe movies in 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2019. He received a second Oscar nomination for his portrayal of real-life wrestler Dave Schultz in the biopic Foxcatcher (2014), about John du Pont, the wrestling benefactor who killed Schultz. In addition, Ruffalo was nominated for an Emmy Award for his starring role in The Normal Heart (2014), a televised version of Larry Kramer’s play about the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Ruffalo’s moving performance as reporter Mike Rezendes in Spotlight (2015), the Oscar-winning film about The Boston Globe’s exposure of child abuse by Roman Catholic priests, earned him a third Oscar nod. He later starred in Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters (2019), a legal thriller about water contamination by a chemical company. For his heart-wrenching double performance as identical twins, one of whom develops schizophrenia, in the TV miniseries I Know This Much Is True (2020), Ruffalo won both an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award.