This article is a perfect example of the kind of expectations those of us who were blown away by Mark Ruffalo’s performance in “You Can Count on Me” had for him and his career. Those expectations are still there for many of us, waiting to be fulfilled by directors willing to take a chance on Ruffalo, and willing to push him to his limits. - Jamaica (FrustratedCastingDirector)
Becoming a Thoughtful Woman’s Idea of A Leading Man Part 1
By CATHY HORYN NOV. 9, 2003
On a cloudless day between the rains this summer, Mark Ruffalo, the 35-year-old actor, took his John Deere tractor out of the barn and began to clear brush on his 50 acres in Sullivan County, not far from where the Delaware River runs between New York and Pennsylvania. He had on jeans and a faded blue shirt that flapped around his thin torso, and his hair was still damp from a swim in the pond that lies at the foot of a grassy hill and a short walk from his two-story Swiss chalet-style house. A patio umbrella and several weathered lawn chairs were set up along the edge, and there was a dock with a wooden diving board that Ruffalo and his younger brother, Scott, a hairdresser in Beverly Hills, built last summer. When the brothers were growing up in Kenosha, Wis., they built many tree houses in the woods near their family’s house – Scott guesses they built one every 10 feet – and they called themselves the Foresters. Two years ago, when Mark was recovering from surgery to remove a benign tumor in his brain, and thinking that his film career had ended just as it was taking off with his widely praised performance in “You Can Count on Me,” he designed the large sleeping porch at the back of the house. Constructed from hemlock, with open beams, it has double-high screened windows, many comfortable old chairs and beds and a closeness with the outdoors.
As Ruffalo positioned the tractor on the far end of the pond, his wife of four years, Sunrise Coigney, a lithe, attractive French woman in a bikini and a straw hat, sat on a blanket near the dock with their 2-year-old son, Keen. Her father, Joel Coigney, who was visiting from Los Angeles, had spent the morning policing the grounds with a chain saw and now joined Ruffalo on the hill. In a moment of perception that took in their voices, the water and the valley below, you couldn’t help thinking that Ruffalo had everything he needed here and that there was no place he’d rather be than here.
It was also the perfect place to observe Mark Ruffalo the actor, for few performers possess their characters with more natural grace. Not only does Ruffalo make it look easy, he also manages to access emotions with a freedom unavailable to many of his better-known contemporaries, making him closer to the older generation of actors – especially the young Brando – for whom anger or sexual tension could often be registered with astonishing stillness. That Ruffalo has appeared in only a handful of big-budget films, usually in supporting roles that have limited him to playing the same type of emotionally conflicted men – and thus kept his real powers under wraps – has not prevented him from being noticed by first-rate directors like Jane Campion. But after the release of Campion’s heated sexual drama, “In the Cut,” co-starring Meg Ryan, followed soon by films in which he stars with Jim Carrey and Tom Cruise, Ruffalo is certain to find a wider audience.
“In the Cut” is based on the novel by Susanna Moore, and despite its problems as a film, Ruffalo, as a New York City homicide detective named Malloy, stands out. On every level his performance is a major turn-on, and maybe because, for the first time, we are seeing him as a man – without conflicts, without boyish tics. In a bedroom scene early in the movie (slightly altered by the censors from the director’s version), Ruffalo takes Ryan’s character, Frannie, on such a bend, using every word and orifice available to him, that many female moviegoers will most likely regard their own mates with mild disappointment.
Given Ruffalo’s previous screen roles, Campion admits he wasn’t an obvious choice to play Malloy, who looks at every woman as a potential score. But, she says, “the thing that interested me about his character in ‘You Can Count on Me’ was that he was such a flake-off, a loser, yet he was riveting. You couldn’t stop watching him.” In “In the Cut,” which takes its name from street slang for sexual intercourse, his presence is so commanding that it can make you forget the film’s flaws, notably its jarring end. “I think it’s incontestable now that he has brought to life a different quality of performance,” Campion says. “And not like Pacino, or De Niro or Keitel, who have each opened up a new way to think about performance. Mark is a visionary with his work.”
Ruffalo seems genuinely surprised by her comments when I see him in Sullivan County. By then, we are fairly along in our conversation, so I am used to his way of speaking. He does more than look you in the eye. He quickly establishes intimacy by allowing himself to lower his guard. Many actors will let you know, directly or indirectly, that they have nothing riding on the outcome of a situation. But Ruffalo has no such obstructions. He is lightning present in the conversation. And though he has little in common with the characters he has played, if he is close to one of them, it is Malloy. Like him, Ruffalo doesn’t hide his manliness under a bushel.
“I don’t know what to say about that, babe,” he says when I tell him what Campion said. He laughs, and his eyes glow with warmth. “That’s flattering. I mean, what do you say? Thank you, thank you, Jane Campion.”
While Ruffalo readily cites Brando as one of his two greatest influences (the other is Marcello Mastroianni, of whom he says, “It’s the whole package of Marcello – the great life in an art form”), he seems uncomfortable being compared with a legend. Kenneth Lonergan, who directed Ruffalo in “You Can Count on Me,” says he should relax. “First of all, he looks a teeny bit like Brando,” Lonergan says. “And I’m sure he can’t mind too much if people compare him to one of the greatest American actors of the last 50 years.” Ruffalo does bear a resemblance to the young Brando, especially around the mouth, but the real point of reference, Lonergan says, is how specific Ruffalo’s performances are and how freely he enters and remains in the moment. “He’s sort of an open channel to his characters,” he says.
The question is why we haven’t seen more of Ruffalo before. He began acting in 1989 in small theater productions in Los Angeles. His parents, a painting contractor and a beautician, had moved Mark and his three siblings (he has two younger sisters) from Kenosha to Virginia Beach, Va., where Mark would become a state wrestling champion in high school, and then to San Diego, where his parents separated. After an aimless period spent mostly surfing, Ruffalo enrolled in the Stella Adler Academy, where Benicio Del Toro was a star pupil. He remembers Del Toro giving a monologue based on the song “Light My Fire”: “He was so sexy and had so much charisma, I thought, I’ll never be that.”
In those years, Ruffalo says, “it was all about urban for me.” He lived in rough neighborhoods like Alvarado and Sixth, in downtown Los Angeles. But as much as he hankered for that kind of experience, and brings a similar instinct to his work, he is no fan of Method. “Two things have happened to acting in America,” he says. “One is that actors think they have to live the character, which is a huge mistake. Because what they do is put the character on top of themselves and thereby kill anything spontaneous. The other is that someone introduced the idea that less is more, so that actors stopped doing anything at all. They just say the words.”
By the mid-90’s, Ruffalo had appeared in some 30 plays, earning good notices. But Los Angeles theater, at its best, is not Broadway, or even Off Broadway, as Ruffalo discovered when he arrived in New York for the first time. “I thought, I’m a swan, not a duck,” he says. “What am I doing in Los Angeles? I don’t belong there.” In 1996, after a decade in California, Ruffalo made his New York stage debut in Lonergan’s “This Is Our Youth.” “He did one play in New York,” says his friend the actor Christopher Thornton, “and it changed his life.” It wasn’t the only change. On a Monday during the play’s run, he took his savings, about $10,000, and made a down payment on a house in Sullivan County.
Another explanation for Ruffalo’s belated recognition involves the vagaries of Hollywood casting. Ruffalo estimates that before he landed the part of Terry in “You Can Count on Me,” opposite Laura Linney, he went on 800 film and television auditions. This is probably not a Hollywood record for rejection, though Ruffalo gives it some comic perspective when I observe that George Clooney remained under the noses of casting directors for years before someone realized what a leading man he was. “If George Clooney was under their noses, then I was, like, under their knees,” he says with a laugh. For all his dead-ending, Ruffalo sounds remarkably unembittered when he adds, “In Hollywood, none of those people can make a decision. They can only say no. I’d go to casting directors, and they’d say, 'You are the best actor of your generation, but – you just haven’t grown into your face yet, your face hasn’t grown into your soul.’ I had insane things like that said to me all the time. 'You are one of the greatest actors I have ever seen, but – .’ I’d get this great feedback, but I could never get a job.”
Still another explanation is that, in the summer of 2001, as he was finishing “The Last Castle,” a prison movie starring Robert Redford, the brain tumor was diagnosed. He underwent a 10-hour operation, complicated by an allergic reaction to the anesthesia, and spent the rest of the year recovering in New York and Sullivan County. His wife, whom he met in 1997 when she was an actress, had just given birth to their son, and as Coigney told me, “You don’t expect a year into a marriage – through sickness and health – for sickness to come upon you so quickly. It’s been quite a journey.” He experienced facial paralysis, memory lapses and, perhaps worst of all, a complete loss of confidence. “I had stopped worrying – I just believed that my career was over,” he says. “No one would take a meeting with me or anything. I was damaged goods, babe. That’s what was in the back of my mind, damaged goods. Can’t fit the American-male leading hero. A hero does not have a brain tumor.”
It was in this vulnerable, if fully recovered, state that Ruffalo first met Jane Campion in Los Angeles to discuss the part of Detective Malloy.
Anyone who has read Susanna Moore’s 1995 novel has no trouble recognizing its difficulties as a movie. For one thing, “In the Cut” deals with female grief and loneliness – specifically, that of a smart, emotionally walled-off writing teacher whose obsession with language serves as a rendering of her engulfed spirit; she’s so aware of the shape of her consciousness that she could diagram it like a sentence. And for another, you don’t really buy the sexual liaison with the cop, which develops as he investigates a gruesome murder in her neighborhood. As Moore herself says: “The book is a little cold, a little nasty, a little flippant. It’s about language and ideas. And it’s not about love. It’s about violence. But Jane found a way to make it about love.”
Ruffalo says he had serious doubts going into his meeting with Campion about his ability to play Malloy. “I had read the script a couple of days before, and I thought, I don’t even know where to begin with this guy,” he says. “I know he’s just a man, he’s such a man. But I had never played that kind of guy, and it just terrified me. I thought, I’m the wrong actor for this part.” Who did he think was right? “Sean Penn or Russell Crowe – tough guys, you know. Guys who were really closer to Malloy than me.” Indeed, as Moore conceived him, Malloy is actually a composite of four or five New York policemen she met while writing her book. She says: “They were worldly, tough, a little bit over the hill. Much less pure than Mark. They were corrupt emotionally and, in some cases, corrupt professionally.” In her mind, she saw “an older Tommy Lee Jones, puffy eyes, a little flabby. Mark was quite an unexpected choice.”
At the end of the three-hour meeting, Campion, who had seen several big-name actors, offered the part to Ruffalo. “We just clicked,” he says. “Jane’s ideas about the script were well formed, but she was confident and experienced enough as a director to allow a discussion to take place. A lot of our differences about the character were just semantics.” Despite his trepidations, he says, “I had never come to a part so consciously aware of what we were after, down to specifics like what Malloy did when he woke up in the morning.”
One thing that may have allowed Ruffalo to reach Malloy is his penchant for severe self-criticism. Christopher Thornton says: “He attacks himself harder than anyone. In 'In the Cut,’ he used those worries and fears. Everything that Mark was going through I’m sure in some way fueled that performance.” During rehearsals, when he was still unused to Campion’s intensity – “She’s out there, man,” he says. “It’s a contained chaos” – Ruffalo went home and got drunk. “Jane and I had some bristling experiences in the beginning,” he says. “There’s an enormous allowance for people to be wrong in her presence, even her. But the great thing about her is she’s not invested with being right.
’'So I was wasted drunk, really depressed, and I set up the video camera,” he continues. “I was, like, I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m totally lost… . A couple of days later I was logging something from the tape and I saw it – I saw Malloy, a shadow of Malloy. My tearing apart and hitting rock bottom was kind of like the birth of him.”
In the genre of police movies, Ruffalo’s portrayal of Malloy seems startlingly realistic – how you imagine detectives to stand and smoke and put their hands in their pockets but rarely do in the movies. There is a scene quite early in the film, when Frannie encounters Malloy and his partner, Rodriguez (Nick Damici), in a bar, that is almost unbearable to watch for its vulgarity. Ruffalo doesn’t just talk in the unholy language of cops; he projects the psychological dynamic in keeping emotions at a distance. Campion, ever alert to the tiniest sign of weakness in Malloy, occasionally caught him, he says, reverting to old habits. “She would say: 'You see that thing you’re doing right there? Don’t do that in this movie. Don’t nod your head. No apologies, Mark. This character does not apologize. Straightforward stillness.’ She made me aware of things. Who calls you on your stuff?”
The film’s reviews have been mixed (though Ruffalo has been held out as its strongest element), but critics and box-office results aside, no one knows better than Ruffalo what the film – and Campion – have done for him. “What I do in the next 5, 10 years will be mostly based on my choices,” he told me. “And it starts now. It wasn’t after 'You Can Count on Me.’ ” He’s at work this fall as an undercover agent in Michael Mann’s thriller “Collateral,” with Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx, about a killer who lures a cabby on a shooting spree. Next year, he’ll appear in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” a comedy written by Charlie Kaufman and starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, in which Ruffalo plays a lab technician operating a memory-erasing machine. “It was sort of a chance to play light and stupid,” he says with a laugh, adding, “Jane’ll kill me when she sees it.” On Campion’s advice, he also did John Curran’s drama “We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” with Naomi Watts and Laura Dern, about the divisive nature of marriage. And sometime next spring, he’ll direct Thornton in a dark comedy called “Sympathy for Delicious,” from a screenplay Thornton wrote, about a self-centered paraplegic who acquires the gift of healing but can’t heal himself. “He basically starts Healapalooza, where he’s healing people in the mosh pit,” Ruffalo says. “It’s kind of an allegory about fame.”
You sense that Ruffalo has used his craft profitably enough over the last decade not to feel he has to make up for lost time. He turned down the role of Brick in the current Broadway revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in order to return to L.A., where his wife has opened a store with a friend to sell jewelry and decorative objects. And Scott Ruffalo notes with pride and dismay that his movie-star brother still drives around in a white 1974 Volkswagen camper. “He loves that thing,” Scott says, adding, “There’s almost this essence of obliviousness going on around him.”
I know what he means. During my visit to Sullivan County, I casually mention that Ruffalo is probably not yet in a position to think about massive fame. He looks at me critically and smiles. “When will I ever think about that?” he says. “What will my thoughts possibly be?”
Still, the rest of us can’t help watching. Susanna Moore told me recently that female friends of hers are already having dreams about him. “Isn’t it interesting,” she muses, “to be witness to someone who is absolutely on the edge of being hurtled into a greater and, in some ways, less lovely world? He’s going to be a very important actor. He’s just now tipping into fame and riches and women chasing him. I think he’ll be O.K.”
