ALTHOUGH he was a fan of Marvel comics during his childhood, actor Mark Ruffalo (Shutter Island, The Kids Are All Right, Zodiac) never imagined that he would be called upon to play a superhero. So when he was enlisted to play Bruce Banner a.k.a. The Hulk, he says that it was “pretty wild”.

“This wasn’t the type of movie that I’d done in the past or the type of movie I’d been invited to do,” he says. “And it was the one character other than Wolverine that I actually thought I could do well.”
At first he was a bit apprehensive about stepping into new acting territory, but he could not deny his excitement and enthusiasm for the project.

“I was a little scared as there wasn’t a script yet, but I was also excited because of what I’d seen Marvel do with Ironman and with Robert Downey Jr., who is a great actor,” says Ruffalo. “When I saw what Robert did with the part, which kind of felt like he recreated the genre a little bit, I felt like I could fit into that world too with my acting style.”

Writer and director Joss Whedon was also a major draw for Ruffalo, who says that he had seen Whedon’s feature film Serenity and “loved it”. He was also familiar with Whedon’s television series, Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
“I really like Joss’ (Whedon) sense of humour and his sense of sci-fi,” Ruffalo says. “He has a very particular style that is very funny and smart and stylised. It was very appealing to me to get to work with him, and when we sat down to talk, we immediately hit it off.”

In their first meeting, Whedon and Ruffalo talked about what they wanted to bring to The Hulk character. They both agreed that they wanted to build on what had come before, but they also wanted to try something new. Ruffalo explains: “We had a lot of common ground on Bill Bixby’s Incredible Hulk TV show as we both grew up watching it. So that was a good starting place.

“What appealed to us about that show was that Bruce Banner was kind of a common man. He also had a world-weary charm about him and a sense of humour, in a strange way, about his situation. You get a sense that he might become master of it or be able to have some control over the behemoth.”

Ruffalo was intrigued with the character and persona of The Hulk and with bringing The Hulk’s anger and rage to the CGI character with a sense of humanity. “Anger is something that’s so primordial in a way and has so many different colours and variations that it’s hard to do it fully with CGI,” Ruffalo explains. “So the idea of bringing this darker, different more humanistic, moving Hulk was compelling.”
In order to do this effectively, he had to explore both sides of his personality and tap into the anger that lies within. But he feels that years of acting prepared him for this role.

“I’ve played both sides of a personality well, and I feel I can access both sides equally,” says Ruffalo. “In a weird way, that’s a culmination of years of acting and really trying to keep what I do broad — as far from one extreme to the other. And that’s essentially Bruce Banner to The Hulk.”

Ruffalo’s character, Bruce Banner, a scientist who specialises in gamma technology, is enlisted by The Avengers team, somewhat reluctantly, to help them track down the energy source that is threatening the world.  
Ruffalo says: “I don’t believe Banner would go anywhere that he didn’t have to, especially under military intervention. But I do think at this moment in his life that he was ready for the call. He was starting to realise that he had to face the beast within himself and come to some sort of terms with it in order to go on with his life.”

Banner had an ambivalent relationship with Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D., played by Samuel L. Jackson. Although he realised that Nick Fury had always known where he was at any given moment and never interfered with his life, Banner could not bring himself to fully trust him.

Ruffalo says of their relationship: “Even though there was enormous distrust in their relationship, I do think Banner believed Fury’s heart was in the right place and that his intentions were true. He just didn’t abide by this kind of opaque strategising that had all of their lives in the balance.”

There was a complex technical process to create a humanistic version of The Hulk, based on obtaining Mark Ruffalo’s expressions and movements through motion-capture technology. Ruffalo found the experience enlightening.
“What is interesting to me is how relatable it is to theatre, which is the oldest form of acting. A theatre actor’s training fits into the world of the green screen very well because as a theatre actor you walk on to a black stage and there’s sometimes nothing there to live off of. They don’t build a big set. A lot of it is in your imagination. So you have to put things out there that aren’t really there,” he says.

Ruffalo was also fascinated with what he saw on the monitors when he was wearing the motion-capture suit. “When you step in front of the monitors with the suit on, there’s The Hulk staring back at you,” he explains. “Every move you make, he makes too. And so, all of a sudden, much like with wearing a costume, you begin to know how the character stands, how he behaves. So you’re in communication with it. You’re creating the character based on that visualisation.

With make-up and prosthetics, your movements are limited, both your facial movements and your body, so it doesn’t allow you to bring the real emotional and physical manifestation of the work you’re doing on the screen. With the motion-capture technology, we’re free as actors, and that’s really exciting to me.”

How Banner deals with his dark side is explored in a different way in Marvel’s The Avengers.

Ruffalo elaborates: “I think that for so long Banner had been trying to negate his anger and rage. Because he was trying to hard to negate it, it had to manifest itself in other ways and eventually it blew up and exploded. So in this movie, there’s this very cool thing where instead of trying not to be angry, he just accepted that he’s angry.  It’s like a vaccination in a way, like by taking a little bit of what will kill you. You actually start to develop some immunity to it. In this movie, we start to see inklings that there’s Bruce Banner sitting somewhere deep inside The Hulk with his hands on the reins.”
 

When asked to describe the rendering of The Hulk he plays in the film, Ruffalo says: “He’s mercurial. And I think he’s actually kind of fun. He’s very unpredictable; you never know what he’s going to do. And he’s very nuanced. There’s a wider range of emotions and qualities to him that are probably more reflective of what we’ve seen in the actual comic books of The Hulk in the past 10 years. There’s a sense of humour there, an ability to communicate. But he’s bristly and he’s dangerous — incredibly dangerous, like a wild animal. He’s also definitely misunderstood — in much the same way a teenage boy is misunderstood.”
Ruffalo has a clear vision of what he’d like audiences to take away after viewing Marvel’s The Avengers.

“First of all, I hope they have a wild ride, which I’m pretty sure they will,” he says. “And then I hope they fall in love with them as a group and want to see the next one. But I hope they also get that if we lay down some of our selfishness, we can make things work.”

- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Malaysia

Marvel’s The Avengers is currently screening in cinemas nationwide

nstent@nst.com.my