Mark Ruffalo has established a solid name for himself as one of Hollywood’s real good guys. Whether he’s picking up lost hitchhikers, inviting fans to join him on the sets of his movies, or promoting the various charities he’s affiliated with, the Wisconsin native is as down-to-earth a movie star as you’re likely to meet.
However, he hasn’t always had it easy in life like other people do.
Given everything he’s been through, it truly is a miracle that he isn’t a total jerk.
Though it may not seem like it, the endearing Avenger is now in his 50s, and his half-century on this planet has been anything but a smooth journey.
He’s in the midst of the highs right now, but before taking on the role of Bruce Banner/the Hulk in Hollywood’s most popular franchise, he had to first experience the lowest of lows and endure things that most of us would find challenging to go through. This is the tragic true story of Mark Ruffalo, who struggled with extreme poverty, illness, and numerous near-death encounters.
Ruffalo wasn’t exactly a standout student when he was younger, despite the fact that he might be able to pull off the role of a scientific genius in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The former C student acknowledged in an interview with Men’s Journal that despite believing he had dyslexia for years, he persisted in finishing high school.
His family’s decision to relocate to San Diego to what the men’s magazine called a “seedy beach community” after he graduated didn’t exactly go according to how his parents’ plans—a house decorator and a hair stylist—had been laid out. In actuality, things started getting worse rather quickly.
The actor claimed, “Within six months, we went from normal to bankrupt and eliminated as a family. His father Frank, who he described as “an artist who never found his art form,” packed up and left his four children and wife Marie behind. He then traveled back to Wisconsin.
In spite of being told he might receive a scholarship, Ruffalo chose to pursue acting after being a standout wrestler in high school. His younger brother Scott joined him in the $600-per-month apartment along with two friends. We would eat off of that bowl of tuna pasta for the entire following week, Ruffalo recalled. The maxim goes, “In the best of times, there are bad times. ”.
Mark Ruffalo doesn’t seem to be a natural fit for the role of the Hulk because playing the Hulk is really about controlling one’s wrath. On the Marvel movie set, Samuel Jackson, who plays Nick Fury, referred to him as a “cuddly little bear” and said that “everyone loves hugging on Mark.” However, he was once a very agitated young man.
He told the New York Daily News, “You should have seen me in my 20s, man.”. “I was the definition 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 returning there wasn’t all that challenging.
For so long, Ruffalo battled professional rejection (he estimates that he auditioned for 600–800 roles without hearing back!). As a result, he started to carry his frustration home with him.
He recalled that when you had previously visited his apartment, “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 admitted to the New York Daily News that while it took some professional help for him to learn how to control his anger, he was eventually able to stop wearing it on his sleeve after realizing how much he had to be grateful for. His brain wouldn’t “shut off” at night, so he eventually found it difficult to fall asleep. Then, he was advised to try meditation by an old friend, and it completely changed his life.
I had a friend who had been a long-time drug addict, Ruffalo said to Rolling Stone. After a few years, we got back in touch after he finished the meditation course. Even though he appeared to be cool, he was actually the world’s most irate person. I had never seen a person undergo such a profound change. The results were so astounding that the actor decided to find his own meditation teacher to see if it would also be effective for him.
“It’s basically a daily practice that quiets your brain and, strangely enough, actually slows down time, so you’re not so much trapped in your immediate reactions to things,” he said. Afterward, everything changed. My employment and good fortune began to change. My view of the world has changed. The actor told a music magazine that meditating gave him “enormous amount of hope” that everything would be okay despite “all the crazy s*** going on in the world.”.
Naturally, Ruffalo was correct.
Even though he knew that everything would work out for him, he still had a lot of tragedy to overcome before getting to that point. He was unable to leave MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, a neighborhood infamous for being overrun with drug dealers and dangerous addicts, even after landing his first paid acting gig (a 1989 Clearasil commercial that hasn’t held up very well).
According to him, “it was the height of the crack wars.”. When we would visit the park in the morning, the grass would be covered in dead bodies. Young women would knock on our door asking for food or money when they were completely wasted and covered in sores on their faces. It was very hefty. After trying to stop some neighborhood kids from stealing a car, the future star’s next-door neighbor was stabbed 12 times on Ruffalo’s front porch, and the violence even followed him to work.
He began bartending at a nearby dive bar after spending all of his Clearasil money. One evening, a gang member barged in and pulled a gun, but fortunately for Ruffalo and his colleagues, the person manning the door at the time was an off-duty police officer. Unfortunately for the gangbanger, 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 chosen to play a role in the drama You Can Count on Me. The film’s success led to a part for Ruffalo opposite the legendary Robert Redford in 2001’s The Last Castle. He told Men’s Journal, “It was big-time. “There I was performing this walk-and-talk with Robert Redford, one of my heroes. What the f*** am I doing here? This is my wildest dream come true! Then I learned that I had a brain tumor. ”.
Amazingly, the actor dreamed about a tumor in such detail that he knew about it before the doctors could confirm it. When the omen struck, he was about to start working on M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (2002) when he sought advice from the production’s doctor. He explained to her, “Listen, I had a really 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. When it was revealed that he was correct, she “went white as a sheet.”.
Ruffalo was told he had an acoustic neuroma, a golf-ball-sized mass behind his left ear, and that he would need surgery as soon as possible to have it removed. He was told by the doctors that he had an 80% chance of losing his hearing and a 20% chance of suffering permanent facial nerve damage.
Since his wife was only a few weeks away from giving birth to their first child at the time, Ruffalo’s passing over the role of Merrill Hess to Joaquin Phoenix was the least of his concerns. His mother recalled, “He didn’t tell anyone for weeks.”. Three weeks after giving birth to son Keen, he underwent surgery, but not before recording a message in case he never woke up. When he finally did, I was like, “Oh my God, how could you bear all that?”.
He admitted, “I was sure I was going to die.”. “I recorded a tape for him, for when he was old enough to comprehend. I’m just letting you know who I am. In an interview with the Acoustic Neuroma Association, Ruffalo stated that his dream was “so startling” that he knew he couldn’t put off the procedure for too long, but he was terrified of the anesthesia due to a previous bad experience. “I simply feared passing away on the operating table. And in a sense, he did.
The actress admitted, “That was scary to me.
My father told me that my heart had stopped briefly on the operating table. Thankfully, it began to beat once more, but even after the benign growth was removed, his battle had just begun. “They said the surgery went well, they removed the entire tumor, and they preserved my nerve, but all I heard was a ringing in my left ear,” the patient said.
”.
Ruffalo helped organize screenings of the Sundance Special Jury Prize-winning fracking documentary Gasland in an effort to spread awareness of its potentially disastrous effects on the environment and those living close to the drill sites. He was allegedly a security risk as a result, which at first he found to be “pretty f***ing funny.”. But as the story gained popularity, he was compelled to start treating it seriously and clarified the situation when he spoke with The Telegraph.
He told the newspaper, “Somehow this story came out about me being on this terrorist list. “To make it sound as ominous as possible, Fox News picked it up and combined it with the murder of my brother. After that, without checking to see if it was true, every news outlet in the nation published it. It didn’t go away until The Washington Times finally nailed the story. ”.
