One of Hollywood’s real good men, Mark Ruffalo has built a solid reputation in the industry. The Wisconsin native is as down-to-earth a movie star as you’re likely to encounter, whether he’s picking up lost hitchhikers, inviting fans to join him on the sets of his movies, or promoting the several charities he’s associated with.
However, life hasn’t always been as kind to him as it is to others. In fact, it’s a marvel he isn’t a complete jerk, given everything he’s been through.
The charming Avenger is now in his 50s, though it may not appear that way, and his half-century on this planet has been anything but a smooth trip.
He’s currently experiencing the highs, but before portraying Bruce Banner/the Hulk in Hollywood’s most successful franchise, he had to first go through the lowest of lows and endure things that most of us would find difficult to go through. This is the tragic true-life account of Mark Ruffalo, who suffered from severe poverty, illness, and multiple near-death experiences.
While Ruffalo might be able to pull off the role of a scientific genius in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he wasn’t exactly a standout student when he was younger. The former C student admitted to Men’s Journal during an interview that he thought he had dyslexia for years but persisted in getting through high school despite it.
The move to what the men’s magazine called a “seedy beach community” in San Diego by his family after graduation didn’t exactly go as his parents’ plans—a house decorator and a hair stylist—had been laid out. In fact, things started to become worse quite quickly.
“Within six months, we went from normal to bankrupt and eliminated as a family,” the actor claimed. Leaving his four children and wife Marie behind, his father Frank—whom he characterized as “an artist who never found his art form”—packed up and headed back to Wisconsin.
Ruffalo was a standout wrestler in high school, but despite being informed he might get a scholarship, he chose to become an actor. He moved in with two pals, his younger brother Scott, and a $600-per-month apartment. Ruffalo remembered, “He’d make a f***ing giant bowl of tuna pasta, and we’d eat off that all week long.” The saying goes, “The best of times, the worst of times.”
Playing the Hulk is really about controlling one’s wrath, thus Mark Ruffalo doesn’t seem like a natural fit for the role. Samuel Jackson, who plays Nick Fury, described him as a “cuddly little bear” and said that “everyone loves hugging on Mark” on the Marvel movie set, yet, believe it or not, he was once a very irate young guy.
“You should have seen me in my 20s, man,” he remarked to the New York Daily News. “I was the epitome of a young man who was angry and had a persecution complex… I was having trouble as a young actor dealing with perceived or actual slights caused by other people. So going back there wasn’t that difficult.
Ruffalo struggled with professional rejection for so long (he estimates that he auditioned for 600–800 parts without hearing back!) that he began to take his frustration home with him.
When you once entered his apartment, he recalled, “There were pictures and posters hanging in very odd places where they were covering fist-holes through walls,” adding, “Glasses that had been thrown through, coffee mugs, books, whatever I could get a hold of.”
The three-time Academy Award nominee said to the New York Daily News that while it took some professional assistance to get his anger under control, he was eventually able to quit wearing it on his sleeve after realizing how much he had to be grateful for. He eventually struggled to go to sleep since his brain wouldn’t “shut off” at night. An old buddy then suggested he try meditation, and it completely transformed his life.
Ruffalo told Rolling Stone, “I had a friend who had been a longtime drug addict.” He completed the meditation program, and after a few years, we reconnected. He had such a cool exterior, but he had been the most angry guy in the world. I had never witnessed a person alter so drastically. The effects were astounding, and the actor sought out his own meditation master to see whether it would also work for him.
“It’s pretty much a daily practice that quiets your brain and, oddly enough, actually slows down time, so you’re not so much trapped in your immediate reactions to things,” he said. “Then everything altered. Both my work and my luck started to alter. My perspective of the world changed. Despite “all the crazy s*** going on in the world,” the actor told the music magazine that meditating gave him an “enormous amount of hope” that everything would be alright.
Of course, Ruffalo was right. Everything was going to be okay for him, but he still had a whole lot of tragedy to get through before he reached that point in his life. Even after he got his first paid acting gig (a 1989 Clearasil commercial that really hasn’t aged well), he couldn’t afford to move out of the Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park, an area notorious for being overrun with drug dealers and dangerous addicts.
“It was the height of the crack wars,” he told Men’s Journal. “We’d go to the park in the morning and there would be bodies strewn out in the grass. Young women, totally strung out, sores all over their face, would knock on our door asking for money or food. It was so heavy.” The future star’s neighbor was stabbed 12 times on Ruffalo’s front porch after attempting to stop some local kids from stealing a car, and the violence even followed him to work.
After burning through his Clearasil money, he started tending at a local dive bar. One evening, a gang member entered and pulled a gun, though, luckily for Ruffalo and his colleagues, the guy working the door at the time was an off-duty police officer. Not so lucky for the gangbanger, however — the cop pulled his own gun and shot him dead on the spot.
Ruffalo’s big break came at the turn of the millennium when he was cast in the critically acclaimed drama You Can Count on Me, the success of which led to a role alongside the legendary Robert Redford in 2001’s The Last Castle. “It was big-time,” he told Men’s Journal. “There I was with one of my heroes, Robert Redford, doing this walk-and-talk. I’m like, ‘What the f*** am I doing here? This is my wildest dream come true!’… And then I found out I had my brain tumor.”
Amazingly, the actor knew about a tumor before doctors confirmed it, having had an incredibly vivid dream about it. He was all set to begin working on M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (2002) when he had the premonition, and he went to the production’s doctor for advice. “Listen, I really had a scary dream last night and you’ll probably think I’m crazy but I think I have a brain tumor and I would really like to get it checked out,” he told her. She went “white as a sheet” when it turned out he was right.
Ruffalo was informed that he had a mass the size of a golf ball behind his left ear (known as an acoustic neuroma) and would need surgery to have it removed as soon as possible. Surgeons informed him that there was an 80 percent chance he would lose his hearing, and a 20 percent chance his facial nerves would be permanently damaged.
Ruffalo was forced to pass the part of Merrill Hess to Joaquin Phoenix, but that was the least of his worries, as his wife was just weeks from giving birth to their first child at the time. “He didn’t tell anyone for weeks,” his mother recalled. “When he finally did, I was like, ‘Oh my God, how could you bear all that?’” Three weeks after he welcomed son Keen into the world, he went under the knife, but not before recording a message in case he never woke up.
“I was certain I was going to die,” he revealed. “I made a tape for him, for when he was old enough to understand. Just saying, ‘Hey, this is who I am.’” During his interview with the Acoustic Neuroma Association, Ruffalo said his dream was “so startling” that he knew he couldn’t put the surgery off for too long, but a previous bad experience with anesthesia had him terrified. “I just had this fear of dying on the operating table.” And, technically, he did.
“My father told me that my heart had stopped briefly on the operating table, so that was scary to me,” the star revealed. Thankfully, it started beating again, but despite the removal of the benign growth, his battle was just beginning. “They told me the surgery went well, they got all the tumor, they preserved my nerve … but I just heard a ringing in my left ear.”
Ruffalo was an avid supporter of Sundance Special Jury Prize-winning fracking documentary Gasland, helping to organize screenings of the film in an effort to raise awareness of its potentially disastrous effects on the environment and those living near the drill sites. This apparently made him a threat to security, which he found “pretty f***ing funny” at first. As the story gained traction, however, he was forced to start taking it seriously, setting the record straight when he sat down with The Telegraph.
“Somehow this story came out about my being on this terrorist list,” he told the newspaper. “Fox News picked it up and bundled it together with my brother’s murder to make it sound as ominous as possible. Then every news organization in the country ran it without bothering to check if it was true. It wasn’t until The Washington Times finally nailed the story that it went away.”
