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Mark Ruffalo: Issue 8

By Gia Coppola

 

Mark Ruffalo worked into his thirties in theatre, tending bar until his big break finally came in 2000 with Grand Jury Sundance Prize winner You Can Count on Me
(2000). Soon came a slew of excellent roles in top dramas including Collateral (2004), Zodiac (2007), Reservation Road (2007) and Shutter Island (2010).A Ruffalo
part soon became a byword for a film’s integrity and nuance. It was no surprise when nominations for Best Supporting Actor Oscars came for The Kids Are All Right (2010) Foxcatcher (2014) and Spotlight (2015).

Ruffalo the activist is also on a mission.With a clarity and purpose honed by personal tragedy and a brush with death, he has consistently taken on fracking and clean water issues. Now he has Trump in his sights. Read on for a truly special interview with a fascinating and decent man.

 
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James Wright: Hi Mark.Where do I find you?

Mark Ruffalo: I’m in Union Square in New York, actually just heading home from a meeting I had at Vice. We’re producing a show about issues with clean water and who the accidental environmentalists are who find themselves in the middle of the struggle.

JW: It’s amazing how much the journalistic paradigm has shifted isn’t it?Vice Media really are at the forefront of investigative reporting.

MR: It’s unbelievable.

JW:As a known news junkie,I’m curious as to how early on the average morning you get your political digest and from where?

MR: It starts very early in the morning, pretty much when I wake up! I’ll scan the Boston Globe, the NewYorkTimes,Washington Post, Huffington Post, then eventually, and most profoundly, I work my way to reader-supported news – curated websites that I find to be incredible, and in line with the kind of news I’m looking to consume.

JW: So, it’s 1pm in NewYork and 6pm in London, and at the time of this interview on September 21st, I’m looking at a screen showing a Real Clear Politics Poll tracking Trump at 44.8 per cent and Clinton at 45.4 per cent. He’s gaining ground. Honestly, what has the Trump candidacy made you feel on a day-to-day basis over this past year, and, more broadly, what do you think the ‘success’ of his campaign says about the divisions in contemporary America?

MR: Awww man. I’m a news junkie and I’m still ignorant. Who knows? It’s complicated. I think there are some compelling anecdotal leaps we can make.We’ve had a media that’s pushed the idea of fear on us over the past fifteen years. Fox News has, I think, had undercurrents of racism during that time and constantly peddled the notion of ‘otherness’, as well as questionable beliefs regarding religion. Ultimately I think it’s a scary world, and people do actually have things to be scared of. There are two ways to handle fear, however: there’s courage, then there’s the opposite of courage which I think is oftentimes a reaction that’s violent, or one that shuts the door on possibility, ultimately shutting the door on who we are as Americans. People forget that we started this country for religious freedom, but now we’re seriously having a discussion, not about if we’re going to keep a religion out or religious profiling, but how we’re actually going to do that. It’s all happening at a time when people are struggling economically.After the Iraq war, there was a crisis of confidence, both in our government and in our media.That’s created a space for this kind of anti-establishment movement that’s happening throughout the nation – a lack of trust in the status quo from both sides.What Trump has done so cynically well, is to capitalise on people’s fear and our most base reactions to those things that make us afraid.That’s resonating with voters at the moment.

JW:You note that events following on from the Iraq war resulted in a distrust in the political establishment on both sides of the aisle.You were very intimately involved in the Bernie Sanders campaign, previously saying that he “awoke something in you”.What was that ‘something’?

MR:The Sanders campaign awoke in me an idea of a type of politics that is people-oriented.A type of politics that is representative of the needs of people in real time, on the ground. Essentially, there was decency there, such a depth of decency.There was caring and there was honesty. For it all to happen outside of the machinery of basically ‘pay-to-play’ was amazing. I think most people in America feel like our political system is deeply corrupted, no matter what side.The Trump people feel that way, and the Bernie people feel that way. People who don’t vote are, today, a huge part of our populace. It’s obscene how many people have just left the whole political process altogether – just given up on it because they’ve become so cynical towards it. All of that represents a loss of credibility to me, and Bernie brought that back. He showed us that you could actually run a campaign that was purely for people, financed by people, listening to the needs of people and addressing the real concerns of people.

JW: On our shoot, you and I spoke a little about Malcolm Gladwell and ‘moral licensing’. How do you feel that framing is relevant to the Obama presidency, racism and the rise ofTrump?

 

 
 
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MR: So Gladwell talks about this phenomenon of ‘moral licensing’ when a culture or society, at a particular moment of time will allow an outsider inside and that makes them feel like they’ve scored moral points.Whatever it was that drove them from letting that outsider in initially, whether it’s racism, misogyny or whatever else, will then create a backlash. One thing that was clear when Obama came into office, especially with ‘Birtherism’, was that there was an explosion of racial framing in America. For some, his presidency was used as this assumption that he was not only not an American, but rather was working for another agency: “he’s gonna take our guns”; “he’s gonna make more welfare queens”; “he’s gonna make people more reliant on the government”. Speaking for myself, all these things were racially framed. All of them created a kind of paranoia about this kind of ‘takeover’.The changes to the status quo of white America, frankly – with demographic changes, cultural changes, and more generally the wider acceptance of marginalised people in our sports, in our entertainment – has also threatened people.There’s clearly a deep racism within our institutions.You can look at the statistics and see that to be true.Whether it’s the judicial system, the education system, our prison system, or our policing system. It’s a fact it skews against people of colour.

JW: I should probably ask you about your film career.You’re now on the East Coast, but did spend time in LA, moving there from San Diego in 1986. It’s funny that your acting school, Stella Adler, is six blocks from the KodakTheatre – where you’d later be nominated at the Oscars for Best Supporting Actor. How has Hollywood and Los Angeles in general changed and shifted shape since you first got there?You first lived in MacArthur Park, right?

MR: I went to LA in the Eighties. I was eighteen, basically a child. I’d admit I was very sheltered. I just didn’t know what the world was really like. I lived in Virginia so I didn’t know many Latin people; I didn’t know many openly gay people.I didn’t know it was a tough place and I’d never lived in a big city. LA at that time was in a cultural explosion of music and art and politics. It was also at the height of the AIDS epidemic and the Act Up movement.The whole punk rock music scene merged into the rock’n’roll hair-band scene, which merged into the art scene, which merged into the whole outsider artist movement scene. It was a freaking happening place! Part of it was because it was so cheap to live there, and you could find pockets in the city where you could rent a room for 200 dollars a month, could produce a play for 5,000 dollars a month.At the time there was a theatre scene in Padua Hills, and this whole explosion of experimental theatre happening because you could do it cheaply with a lot of performance artists who were coming out of Parsons and Pasadena, and CalArts. Hollywood Boulevard, where I went to school, was at the height of its urban blight; if it wasn’t a crack addict, it was a prostitute.There was no tourist scene there, it was either pornography stores or shuttered stores. I came for California; the Hollywood that I’d seen in the movies, and what I landed on was... something entirely different. And I was completely transformed, I was exposed to all of these totally different things at one time. I lived in a predominantly immigrant Latin American neighbourhood, so I came to really get to know that community.They cared for me; they fed me; they looked after me; they took me into their homes and their families and they contributed enormously to the culture in that part of LA. It really was a beautiful cultural hotbed of all these different cultures mingling. That was the beginning, then crack landed. I can’t really give you my experience as an actor without giving you this aspect of my back story, because the business didn’t make me who I am. I couldn’t get an acting job for a long, long, long time. My experience of Hollywood was this other experience, which shaped me in the deepest ways. What I was seeing of Hollywood was always from the point of view of the outsider, as someone who wasn’t privileged in that world, as someone who was not really accepted in that world. Part of that long struggle has been kind of like a blessing to me.The things that I learned and saw, I still feed off as an actor.That’s the essence of my work, my feelings and my worldview. It was my experience with AIDS, people struggling with AIDS, and a widespread cover up of the truth that opened my eyes to that as a systemic problem. It doesn’t just happen with AIDS, it happens with the environment, it happens with pollution and it happens with corruption.

JW: I was going to ask, whether, with the benefit of hindsight, there was any advice that your 48-year- old self would give to your 18-year-old self, with respect to that time in your life? But it sounds like – regardless of the apocryphal tales of 600 failed auditions – it was a very formative time for you, not necessarily on a professional level, but on a personal level, fundamentally feeding into everything that you’ve done since.

 
 
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MR:Totally, and I used to have a very negative attitude about Los Angeles. I actually wrote a poem about it... maybe I’ll send it over. It’s me coming to peace with the gift of Los Angeles, as well as my feelings of resentment and anger towards it. My feelings of loss. I lost my brother in Los Angeles. There’s a part of Los Angeles that can be really hard on people. It’s not a gentle place, and more sensitive people get eaten up and spat out there. Sometimes it’s... hard. It’s been a great teacher to me, Los Angeles. In all of its multi-faceted, power- centric ways, there are also cultural and economic touchpoints everywhere you look – the influx of different kinds of people from all over America, to the influx of different races, to the disparity between poverty and wealth. JW: I was working at the production company Hart-Sharp Entertainment, just as their film, and your breakout film, You Can Count on Me (2000) came out.There’s something about the film, its mix of modesty, tenderness and quiet melancholy, that has never left me. Having done so many films since, on a much bigger scale, seen by many more people, do you still look back at You Can Count on Me with a fondness or nostalgia even?

MR: I’m still searching to top it. In its freshness, its naïveté, its sincerity, its humility... its courage and its artistry. I see that film and think that maybe I haven’t really got back to that in all the work I’ve done. And I’m proud of the work I’ve done, you know, there’s some OK work in all that! But if I watch that film, even though it’s been a long time, I think ‘Oh, wow.You did some great work there.’ I think it was vulnerable and honest, and there’s nothing slick or easy about it – it’s completely guileless in a way.The experience was funny, because it was Kenneth [Lonergan]’s first film, and it was really my first film where I felt free and like I was getting to do what I wished I could do. Kenny knew how to create that space where an actor can be the best they can possibly be, with the best words and the most amount of time and freedom and love. I have come very close to that experience in many other places but I don’t know if it’ll ever be like your first, you know.And that was my first, and I was lucky to have that as my first.

JW: Thats really nice to hear. I’m glad that after sixteen years, it’s stayed with you as it has for the people who know and love it.

MR: It’s a sweet movie, and really a movie about love.

JW: Shortly after, in 2001, you vividly dreamt that you had a brain tumour and after having a scan, it turned out that you did.To what extent did such a serious medical diagnosis, treatment, and later recovery, alter your perspective on acting and work in general?

MR: In effect, I lost my career in that moment, or rather, I was convinced that I had, because the left side of my face was paralysed. I had a baby at home, we were newlyweds – we were just starting our lives. There were the beautiful, wonderful experiences of This Is OurYouth and You Can Count On Me and I was just starting a movie with Robert Redford and James Gandolfini. All my dreams were there. It was the perfect life, the perfect everything. In a matter of two weeks, it was gone. My face was paralysed, I was dropped from the movie I was going to be shooting afterwards, co-starring with Mel Gibson. I didn’t know how to move forward and didn’t have anywhere to move back to; I didn’t have people I could fall back on, no exit strategy, nothing! At that moment it was astounding how fragile my little kingdom on earth was. It was, in many ways, pretty much gone as far as I was concerned.There was some hope that my face was going to come back, but it was only getting worse. I saw it all gone to shit. So when you spend your life trying to do something, and you finally get to do it and you quit your bartending job, and people seem to agree for the most part that you know what you’re doing and you’ve got something to offer, well when it’s gone, all you want to do is have it back. In that moment, the heart of darkness, when hope is gone, all that’s there is despair, you start to daydream and fantasise about what you wish you had. So that made me appreciate my work, my good fortune and my life, in a way that some other people might not.

It also made me pissed at God.Why me? Why are you doing this? Whatever relationship I had to a higher power at that time was completely trashed, it was all trashed.I’m surprised my wife and I stayed together, it was only by her grace and decency and compassion, because I was a monster. I was all jacked up on steroids, I was paranoid, I was angry – it was not a good moment.Then, it started to heal – my face miraculously started to come back. The prognosis was that if you had a paralysis as long as I had, the chances of it coming back were hurt every day – ever diminishing,ever more minuscule. It was something like a 10 per cent chance of my face coming back. I couldn’t even close my eye, or even begin to close my eye.When it started to come back, I could just make a tiny twitch, which to me and my wife at that moment, was an absolute profound miracle. In that time I thought,‘If I ever get to work again, it’ll be amazing, I’ll be so happy and grateful.’ I still have my days where I’m like, this sucks, maybe I could do something else. But, I’m like everyone else – I’m not walking around in a beautiful pink cloud of gratitude all the time, but I did have that experience of losing it all, then somehow getting it back. It made me love my work more.

 
 
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JW: Nine years later, after The Kids Are Alright (2010) you said, “Somehow everything changed. Acting didn’t have the same importance as before.” Can you elaborate a little about why that film marked such a turning point for you personally?

MR: At some point, a ‘business’ comes up around your acting and you’re employing a lot of people because that business starts making a lot of money. I started to not feel in control of my own destiny or choices. It got really convoluted, and diluted. What I was after, and why I loved cinema got a little mashed-up, you know? I was starting to direct, and for so many reasons, I felt like my time in front of the camera was done.In a way,I also felt like I didn’t have any juice left; whatever creative wellspring I was getting inspiration from wasn’t feeding me any more.Why was I finding myself compromised and feeling uncomfortable?Then my brother died. That pushed me completely out of it. It was such a profoundly tragic and traumatic experience.Those moments make you take rash decisions, but I was like, that’s it, I’m done with acting, I’m going to direct, produce, write. I’m going to do one last movie, a movie that really turns me on – just for my pure enjoyment. So I did The Kids Are Alright, and I did it with reckless abandon. I didn’t give a shit about the way people thought about me, didn’t care if people liked me or not, didn’t feel like I had to behave, just threw it all to the wind. It was probably one of the best times I’d had in five or six years. It reminded me that this is what it’s about: it’s about my personal experience, not about the outcome – I can’t control the outcome. Most importantly, it should be about doing something you believe in, that means something to you as an artist – something you’ve never done before, a message you’re dealing with personally, or something that you believe.That should be what drives you. If you can do that, maybe you’re on the right track. It opened me up, loosened me up and made me less afraid to be a failure, less afraid of my image, less afraid to put myself out there in other ways – politically, socially, what have you.

JW:There’s a line through some of your most critically acclaimed work, both in terms of the pacing and tone, but also in terms of the fact that you’re playing real-life characters. What duties to the truth do films like Zodiac (2007), Foxcatcher (2014) and Spotlight (2015) have?

MR: Stella Adler, my acting teacher, said that truth is the North Star, you know? That part of her faith was the search for truth – she believed that there is such thing as a truth, an essential truth, a universal truth, but she also believed there’s a truth in character. I was taught that as an actor, you lifted yourself up into the material, which meant that you’re in service to the material.You put your ego and yourself second.With respect to your question, I think you should be as honest and truthful to the material and the people you’re playing as possible. If you can do that, then you’ll have not only an incredibly varied career, but you keep yourself out of getting into trouble. By trouble I mean – the truth is solid,it’s not flimsy.It has solidity to it.When you’re working from that you’re standing on really solid ground. If what you’re after is the truth then it’s really hard to tell a lie, if every move you make is somehow pivoting from some aspect of the truth. I guess it’s a pretty esoteric thing!What it forces you to do is get out of yourself, get out of your comfort zones to put aside image. So many actors are so hung up with their image, you know, and I see the image as one of those dragons that you have to fucking slay. It’s actually a projection.We hang onto the image, as if that is the thing that people admire about us, or like about us, or want to see about us, but the fact of the matter is it’s something deeper and more essential than that, and something much less fixed. So the really exciting actors are the ones who are willing to transcend that.

JW:You’ve had a career that has spanned some of the most influential and critically acclaimed independent films of the last twenty years, but it’s also contained some of the most commercially successful films of all time in the Marvel franchises. The latter must have given some degree of freedom and possibility. In light of that, what goals do you still have as an actor, or are your aspirations now slightly more rooted in producing and/or directing, or perhaps your work as an activist?

MR: For a long time I was focusing on myself – my career and in some ways my own enjoyment of life. I learned something in the fight against fossil fuels, that we can’t treat ourselves the same way that the extractive industries treat the planet! To constantly take, without reciprocating is, frankly, unsustainable. I think that goes for a career too. I’ve worked really hard for a long time, and I missed some of my family growing up; I’ve missed and put aside some of my hobbies, things that just make Mark, Mark: drawing, or surfing or wandering around, or writing.The things that just make me happy too. I just focused on a career and fighting the good fight all the time. I want to focus more on the fundamental aspects of just enjoying being alive.That’s my new project!

 

 
 
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Photographer: Gia Coppola; Creative Direction: James Wright & Lewis Carpenter; Stylist: Liz McClean; Stylist Assistant: Emily Briggs; Grooming:Thomas Dunkin @ Bridge; Production: Johnny Pascucci & Ian Mangiardi @ Photobomb; Production Assistant: Justin Spates; Location: Holly Li Productions