Mark Ruffalo: a role from the heart for film's great activist

http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2014/apr/27/profile-mark-ruffalo-the-normal-heart-aids-play

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He has seized the megaphone available to Hollywood idols in order to rail against those who deny climate change and those who would outlaw abortion. He called for gay marriage to be legalised years before Barack Obama felt safe to do the same.

Yet while Mark Ruffalo has won plaudits from liberal activists for taking a stand in the great social battles of the age in his spare time, he has in recent years been better known in his day job for his uncontroversial portrayal of a comic-book superhero.

Now, though, Ruffalo has found time between playing Bruce Banner and the Hulk in the Avengers series for the most politically engaged role of his 25-year career, albeit in a film that is about 25 years overdue. The 46-year-old takes the lead in The Normal Heart, the keenly awaited HBO adaptation of a Tony-award winning play about the early days of the Aids crisis in New York, which first burned with indignation from an off-Broadway stage almost 30 years ago.

The urgent fury that it directed at the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and New York City mayor Ed Koch, for their appallingly slack responses to the "gay plague" might be lost on some in today's audiences. But Ruffalo insists that the film may help mainstream America to confront what remains a stain on its recent history.

"It's been said that it takes a culture 30 years or so to be able to reflect on its faults and its shortcomings," Ruffalo told the Observer last week, during a break in filming. "I think it's really time for us to take a look at what happened during the Aids crisis in America. Sometimes, you gotta open up the wound to clean it out for it to heal."

The Normal Heart, which also stars Julia Roberts and will be shown in Britain on Sky Atlantic, tells the story of Ned Weeks, the prickly founder of an early advocacy group for the victims of HIV.

In the face of opposition from meeker allies, Weeks pushes for a noisy and aggressive campaign to increase public awareness and political pressure about the terrible disease that is killing thousands of gay men. It is the largely autobiographical work of Larry Kramer, the veteran HIV-positive playwright and co-founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, and is directed by Ryan Murphy, the co-creator of Glee, the hugely successful high school musical television series.

Born in Wisconsin to an Italian-American, working-class family in 1967, Ruffalo moved south to Virginia in his teens before heading to San Diego, California, where he embraced surfing and marijuana before getting into the Stella Adler drama school in Los Angeles on "bullshit and a dime", as he once put it. Benicio Del Toro was a contemporary.

Television advertisements, minor film roles and an appearance in Due South, the Canadian Mountie television drama, stacked up before he made a breakthrough in 2000 with the Oscar-nominated You Can Count On Me alongside Laura Linney and Matthew Broderick. That same year, he married his partner, the French actress Sunrise Coigney, reportedly after she turned down his proposal once before.

He then won a dream role alongside Robert Redford and James Gandolfini in the military thriller The Last Castle, and then: disaster. After a vivid dream in which he imagined having a brain tumour, Ruffalo discovered that he really did have a brain tumour. He kept it secret from Coigney, who was about to give birth to the first of their three children, before undergoing surgery. "I was certain I was going to die," he said.

But he recovered, and so did his career. Despite never having reached the top flight of leading men, Ruffalo has put in solid performances in David Fincher's Zodiac in 2007 and Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island in 2010. He reached what may yet prove to be his critical peak that same year as the bohemian sperm donor to Julianne Moore and Annette Bening's lesbian couple in The Kids Are All Right, which secured him nominations for both an Academy Award and a Bafta.

By then, however, life had dealt another terrible blow. In December 2008, his younger brother Scott, a 39-year-old Beverly Hills hairstylist, was murdered at his home. Discovered with a gunshot wound to the head, he had cocaine and morphine in his system. The case has never been solved. "You never get over it – you just get used to it," Ruffalo has said.

Now he is probably best known for his performance as Bruce Banner and his musclebound alter-ego, Hulk, in Joss Whedon's 2012 ensemble superhero megahit The Avengers. The film, which also stars Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man and Chris Evans as Captain America, is the third-highest grossing picture of all time. Ruffalo is currently filming the sequel, Age of Ultron, in London.

Despite the film's commercial success, Ruffalo eagerly snapped up the lead in The Normal Heart, a vehicle for his return to higher-brow respectability. Despite expectations that the high-profile cast would secure it a widespread theatrical release, Murphy instead elected to take the film straight to TV through HBO. Bosses at the station, home of acclaimed series such as The Wire and Game of Thrones, insist this was his first preference.

Still, the decision came as the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh admitted that he took the same route last year with Behind the Candelabra, his acclaimed HBO biopic of Liberace, after major studios told him the project was "too gay".

Such residual prejudice provoked Ruffalo's activist side when he took on the role. "Occasionally, you come across parts that align with your beliefs and your passions and your sense of justice," he said. "I hope that the movie actually does create a dialogue, and educates people, and inoculates us against doing it again. Except we're not that smart."

The list of his chosen causes was already long. Amid a tightening of access to abortion in several states, the actor last year waded into one of most divisive debates in US politics by declaring that the country must not return to the days when his mother was forced to have a "shameful and sleazy and demeaning" illegal termination. "I can't overstate the importance of Mr Ruffalo's decision to speak out," said Nancy Northup, the president and chief executive of the Centre for Reproductive Rights.

But much of his spare time now is consumed by Water Defense, the pressure group he founded to help protect the public water supply from the risk of contamination by the rapidly booming hydro-fracking industry.

The issue is particularly close to home. Ruffalo, Coigney and their children live on a converted dairy farm beside the Delaware river in Callicoon, upstate New York. "It's pretty much a blue-collar community, a farming community," he said. "I wanted them to have that experience."

Their home, however, also happens to sit atop the Marcellus shale bed, believed to be one of the world's richest, which is being eyed hungrily by oil and gas companies lobbying the governor, Andrew Cuomo, to allow them to frack.

Visiting communities where fracking was under way, Ruffalo said, he found families unable to drink the polluted tap water in their homes.

"This very simple thing was no longer available to them," he said. "They contacted me and were like, 'Help us, get our story out there. No one else is listening to us.'"

He started appearing as a talking head on the topic on cable news and kept going. His work on the subject has also left him bitterly disappointed by Obama, whom he has urged to take a bolder stance on countering carbon emissions. "To be a leader, you've gotta lead a little bit," said Ruffalo.

He is drawn instead, he said, to senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the only self-professed socialist in the US Congress, and to senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the populist former Harvard professor who is being urged by the American left to challenge Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

Though conscious of the potential ridicule that comes with being the latest luvvie on a crusade, he is ready to alienate some of his followers in the American heartlands. "I might take a hit," he said. "There's no doubt I will, and I have, but there are some serious issues ahead of us." Such criticism, he said, is "the price that you pay for being a human citizen". After all, he said, it would certainly beat "lying on my death bed saying, 'You know what? I should have had a little bit more courage.'"