Mark Ruffalo was booked into the Belgrade Hyatt, a little piece of Vegas with
views of a nearby construction site and a housing estate that looks like a
high-rise South African township, but checked out when he discovered a hotel
in the centre of town. The room key is huge and resembles a cast-iron NYPD
detective’s badge. “It’s like an anchor,” he marvels. “I think they know how
prone I am to losing things.” His suite, he says, is a throwback to
communism and life under President Tito in the former Yugoslavia. “They
still have the bugs in the ceiling, hidden everywhere.”
This has been his home for the Serbian leg of a journey that has taken him
from Prague to Montenegro and Romania too, all these places doubling for
cities as far afield as Athens, Mexico City and Berlin, as filming continues
on The Brothers Bloom, a conman story directed by 34-year-old
California Rian Johnson, director of 2005’s high-school noir Brick.
In The Brothers Bloom, Ruffalo plays Stephen, the elder of two brothers
who have established themselves as the world’s most refined con artists,
constructing baroque swindles, involving elaborate scripts, props and
extras. His put-upon younger sibling (Adrien Brody) wants out, but Stephen
persuades him to stay for one last job, one that will take them from New
Jersey – home of their latest target, lonely eccentric millionairess
Penelope (Rachel Weisz) – to the other side of the globe and back. So off
they go, with their mute sidekick Bang Bang (Rinko Kinkuchi), a beautiful
but crazy amateur explosives expert, in tow.
It sounds bizarre, and it is, but Ruffalo’s been enjoying the ride. “I’ve
never done anything that’s taken me away from home this long,” he says, when
we meet in the Hyatt bar for a drink on a Sunday, his day off. “I mean,
going to so many different places, and so far away. We really are like a
band of merry-minstrel gypsies; it’s like a travelling circus!
“I mean, it’s such a world we’re entering in this movie that I think it serves
us all really well to be out of our element. We’re kind of pitching our
tentpole everywhere we go and creating this magical, heightened, realistic
world that the movie takes place in. But it was an exciting opportunity, and
immediately I was trying to figure out ways to get my family to come, and
for as long as possible.”
Stephen is an unusual part for Ruffalo, who, since his breakout in 2000’s You
Can Count On Me, has frequently appeared in films dealing with death,
regret or, often, both, making an impression with his dark-eyed, soulful
honesty. Here, though, direct from playing the consumed Inspector David
Toschi in David Fincher’s Zodiac, he gets the chance to play a
brighter spark.
“Stephen’s a classic conman,” he says. “By that, I mean that of all the conmen
I’ve known – and I’ve known a few, being in the business I’m in – the most
remarkable thing about all of them is their joie de vivre and how
contagious that is, and how exciting it is to be in close proximity to it. I
think that may be a prerequisite for every conman.
“So Stephen has this irrepressible charm, and insistence, and ability to make
people feel at ease in the most uncomfortable situations. But I also think
he has this kind of underlying sadness, though, that if he’s left alone too
long he drops like a weight. And to keep himself out of that very deep
water, he likes to keep things moving along.”
The same could be said of Ruffalo. Coming up to 41, he’s a family man with a
boy and two girls – aged six, three and nearly one – a dog and a lizard, who
describes himself as “pretty much a goof in my life, and I become more so
with the kids, y’know?”
But though he’s on a roll right now, it wasn’t always the way. In high school
he was a wrestling champ who, in his senior year, decided to give all that
up. “I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life,” he shrugs. “I
secretly wanted to be an actor, but everyone around me was like, ‘Oh no, no
one ever makes it in that business.’ I come from a very blue-collar,
straightforward background; my father runs an industrial painting company
and my mom was a hairdresser at the time. They were part of a line of
pragmatic second-generation Italians, to whom the American dream was just
digging in, working hard and reaping the benefits. So the idea of this
artistic pipe dream was not well supported, except by my mom and dad. But
the rest of my family were like, ‘You wanna do what?’ ”
When his family moved from Wisconsin to San Diego, he joined Stella Adler’s
acting classes at 18 and studied for six years. Film work, though, was the
furthest thing from his mind. “No, dude, I thought I was never gonna ever
do movies,” he sighs. “In my first class there was Benicio Del Toro and
Salma Hayek. I saw Benicio and I was like, ‘That guy is a f***ing star.
So charismatic, so natural. I’ll never make it in this business.’ But I did
feel I had talent, I just didn’t see myself ever making it – I was so
insecure. I still pinch myself today.” He laughs. “I catch myself in moments
of too much self-reflection; I’m like: “I’m a fraud; I’ve fooled everybody.’
”
After nine years of bar work in an LA roughhouse, Ruffalo’s breakthrough in
2000 led him to the attention of M. Night Shyamalan, who cast him opposite
Mel Gibson in his sci-fi thriller Signs. But Ruffalo never played the
part; in the meantime he’d been diagnosed with an acoustic neuroma, a benign
brain tumour that briefly paralysed his face and left him partially deaf. “I
lost my hearing in my left ear, so my balance was completely shot,” he says.
“It was actually comical, I was just falling down all the time for the first
couple of months. I’d walk a few steps, fall down. But for every hour you’re
under anaesthesia, they say, it’s a month of recovery, and that was ten
months right there. So there was a time of getting myself back, my sense of
self, my independence.”
He hates talking about that period of his life and recalls, with horror, the
rumours that went round about him: that he had Aids, he was in rehab, he had
a drink problem. But even simply being in hospital made him think he’d had
it. “There is a perception in our culture that if you are ill, you’re
damaged,” he says, “and that was frightening to me.” But, strangely, though,
the drought never came, and Ruffalo has been working ever since, with hardly
a gap on his CV.
So what’s his secret? “Directors respond to me,” he says. “Studios don’t. I’ve
never got a call from a studio saying, ‘We’re looking for a picture for
you.’ I have got calls from directors saying to me: ‘I have a studio movie I
want you to be in and I have a helluva a fight ahead of me.’ That’s usually
the conversation. I’ve never had a studio reach out to me, ever. And it’s
always been a fight for the director to get me. Unless it’s somebody like
Fincher.” He laughs. “If that movie makes money, who knows, maybe I’ll
become a studio baby.”
In the meantime, though, he’ll keep doing it his own way. “The one thing that
I’m very proud of in my career is that I’ve really done a lot of different
stuff. But ultimately I’m a character actor, which is really where I
flourish.”
And with The Brothers Bloom he’s once again showing his lighter side,
which we haven’t seen since he played a mad mohawk in Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. “Yeah,” he nods, “but I keep heading back
towards grim.” He smiles. “I guess I like the grim.”
The Brothers Bloom shows at OWE2, Oct 27, 8.30pm, and at OWE1, Oct
28, 4pm
