Mark Ruffalo interview: 'Nothing causes more pain than family'

Mark Ruffalo readily admits his reluctance to do what was required for his latest role, playing a pair of twin brothers in HBO’s new drama I Know This Much Is True. It was not, as one might perhaps expect, the considerable technical challenges of playing twins, one of whom suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, that concerned him; he just wasn’t keen on gaining more than two stone in five weeks.

“I kept trying to get Derek [Cianfrance, the writer and director of the six-part miniseries] to change the plan,” he chuckles. “I told him, ‘You can get really good fat suits now’.”

But, on his director’s orders, the 52-year-old actor committed to his art. “The strategy was just to eat a bunch of carbs – lots of pasta, bread, doughnuts, ice cream – all the stuff that makes me really puffy.”

Getting paid to be a glutton sounds fun, I say. But apparently not. “I got heartburn from almost everything. I had to sleep sitting up because I had such bad indigestion. In the end, all I could really keep down was oatmeal. So I’d eat bowls and bowls of oatmeal, with butter, maple syrup and heavy cream.”

Today, speaking on Zoom from his home in the Catskills in upstate New York, where he’s quarantining with his wife, fellow actor Sunrise Coigney, and their three teenage children, Ruffalo appears to be back to his fighting weight. “But I felt like a foie gras goose,” he laughs.

Fortunately, all the fattening up was worth it; Ruffalo’s performance in I Know This Much Is True is award-worthy. Adapted from the 1998 novel by Wally Lamb, the family saga follows the fortunes of the Birdsey brothers, born in New England on either side of the 20th century; one twin in the last minutes of 1949, the other in the first moments of 1950. From the outset, Dominick and Thomas endure trauma and volatility, their unnamed and absent father replaced by a cruel, cold stepfather (played by John Procaccino) who dominates their timid mother (Melissa Leo).

By the time the brothers reach college, the always-sensitive Thomas displays signs of instability; at 40, he chops off his own hand in a public library, in a bloody and delusional protest against the first Gulf War.

Dominick, a divorced teacher-turned-housepainter, who has spent his adult life protecting and supporting his brother, has suffered his own considerable traumas, including the death of his infant daughter.

Though the series is set in Nineties Connecticut, flashbacks to the twins’ boyhood, college years and earlier adult lives chart Thomas’s descent into mental illness, and Dominick’s valiant, but increasingly futile, attempts to protect him, his sacrifices often shot through with pent-up (and not so pent-up) rage.

The biggest challenge, not surprisingly, was shooting the parts where both Dominick and Thomas were in the same scene at the same time. This could not have been done without the help of fellow actor Gabe Fazio. For the first 13 weeks, Ruffalo played Dominick and Fazio stood in as Thomas. Then Ruffalo went off for his five-week oatmeal splurge, while also, as he puts it, “going down into the heart of this mental illness, studying it, and imagining that life – hearing voices, being heavily medicated for years.”

Then Cianfrance resumed shooting, with a slimmed-down Fazio – who had lost two stone – now playing Dominick and Ruffalo playing Thomas. Impressively, when putting together the scenes that featured both brothers, the director used minimal CGI, relying primarily on camera angles, and cutting down the number of scenes in which the brothers had physical contact.

“I learned how difficult it is to live with the constant barrage of negative voices and how difficult it is to concentrate, how difficult it is to discern between what’s real and what isn’t,” says Ruffalo, of playing a schizophrenic. “But because the world sees Thomas as mentally ill he doesn’t have the same kind of expectations on him. In a lot of ways, Thomas is much freer than Dominick is, much more able to express himself, much less bound to ideas of manhood, masculinity, domination and control.”

The Birdsey brothers’ heritage was not something Ruffalo struggled to connect with. “This blue-collar world is a world that I understand, that I grew up in,” he says. “I’m second-generation Italian; my family started out as house painters. There’s a family dynamic that’s very intense, there’s a masculinity that we learned as Italian-American males.”

One of four siblings growing up first in Wisconsin, then Virginia, where Ruffalo’s mother, Marie, was a hairdresser and his father, Frank, a construction painter, Ruffalo moved to Los Angeles in his early 20s, founded a theatre group and spent several years putting on plays in small auditoriums.

He was part of the original off-Broadway cast of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth in 1998, which led to the writer and director casting him two years later as Laura Linney’s brother in the hugely successful You Can Count on Me, launching his Hollywood film career in the process.

Though he has since followed the well-trodden A-list path into the Marvel Universe, playing Bruce Banner/Hulk in the Avengers franchise, Ruffalo has also won acclaim for his more emotionally complex work, including an Emmy nomination for his performance in the television adaptation of the Aids drama The Normal Heart, and an Oscar nomination for his turn as a sperm donor to Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in The Kids Are All Right.

His roles as the wrestler Dave Schultz in Foxcatcher and as journalist Michael Rezendes in Spotlight won him a second and third Oscar nomination. “I want to be the kind of artist who can’t be labelled, who surprises people and surprises myself, and sometimes f---- it up and, sometimes, makes it work,” he says of his choices.

Family trauma is also something Ruffalo has experienced first-hand. On December 1 2008, his younger brother, Scott, a successful hairdresser in Beverly Hills, was shot at his home, dying in hospital a week later. Ruffalo has said before that he does not expect to ever get over the killing, which has never been solved. “I’m the type of actor that likes to draw on my experiences, and my brother will always be a big part of that,” he says. I Know This Much Is True is dedicated to his brother. “Scott’s in all this and in all of my work in some way or another.”

Of course, Ruffalo is well aware that the series, which is harrowing and heartbreaking, is airing at a time when most of us need our spirits lifting, not dampening. But he believes that the Birdsey brothers’ story is pertinent. “A pandemic like this strips away all of the trappings and busyness of our lives and leaves us with what really is of value, and that’s family,” he says. “But family is also difficult and brings challenges, and exposes all our vulnerabilities and our weaknesses.

“For me nothing’s more meaningful, more painful, more conflicted, more challenging, and more rewarding than the relationships that I’ve had with my own family members. And that’s particularly apropos for the moment we find ourselves in.”

I Know This Much Is True begins on Sky Atlantic and Now TV tonight at 9pm