Ah, gaad, no matter how fine an actor Mark Ruffalo is, there's just no hidin' his flaat Wiskaansin aackcent. He moderates it in his new film, the Martin Scorsese-directed Shutter Island, opening on Friday. But speaking with him last week, his accent was like a steamroller that flattened every vowel in its path.
Ruffalo is articulate and clearly intelligent, but I gotta tell ya, I loved hearing him talk about "studying with Stella Aaadler," and how he mixes up roles so he's "not playing myself kahnstantly." By the time he mentioned that the recently concluded Sundance Film Festival - where he premiered his directorial debut, Sympathy for Delicious - was a hoot because two other films there, Gasland and Catfish, were made by his "naybours" in rural upstate New York, I was charmed. Or rather, "chaarmed," because he pronounced the titles "Gaasland" and "Kaatfish." (I could haappily type double a's all day, but I'll let you imagine his voice from now on.)
I'm glad Ruffalo, 42, still sounds like his native Kenosha, Wis., because it's aural evidence of how rooted in the real he is, even after years of theatre training followed by 20 more of swinging like a pendulum toward and away from Hollywood stardom. Since his breakthrough role as Laura Linney's troubled brother in You Can Count on Me (2000), he's tempered his stabs at popularity (13 Going on 30, Rumor Has It) with more idiosyncratic, interesting stuff ( My Life Without Me, We Don't Live Here Anymore, The Brothers Bloom). To me, Ruffalo is at his best when he's working for a maverick director and playing the guy who stands solidly beside a more famous guy - for example in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Michel Gondry, co-starring Jim Carrey; or in Zodiac, directed by David Fincher, opposite Robert Downey, Jr.
In Shutter Island, costarring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ruffalo plays a cop circa 1954 who's investigating the disappearance of a patient from a sinister, lightening-lashed asylum for the criminally insane. It feels right at home next to the period melodramas that Scorsese screened for his cast, including Laura (1944), Out of the Past (1947) and Vertigo (1958). "I'm a chaaracter aactor, I really aam," Ruffalo said. (Sorry, I'll stop now, I swear.) "Over the years I've been just happy to work, and I've found the experience of working with different people to be nourishing."
Lately, though, he's been hungry for something saner. For a regular guy (father of three, married 10 years to actress Sunrise Coigney), Ruffalo has confronted more than his share of mortality. In 2002, he had a brain tumour removed (it turned out to be benign). Then in December, 2008, his brother Scott, a hairdresser, was murdered; the case is still unsolved. Last year, after finishing Sympathy for Delicious and a few acting gigs, Ruffalo fired his agent and long-term manager, and quit working for a while.
"I've been spending the last six, eight months doing a lot of re-evaluation," he said. "I'm not sure where I am with acting. I'm grateful for the career I have and for the time my old manager put into it. But I needed to make a change. Sometimes the business of acting can bowl you down and suck you up into its undertow. The commercialization of everything - that everything has a price tag on it - those things don't feed us, or make us feel good about ourselves. And I'm getting older now, I know I'm not going to be a machine. Maybe there are people who thought I was, but I'm not. I just wanted to be clean, I wanted to get out of that for a while."
He paused. "Really, probably it was losing my brother," he said. "It made me put the brakes on everything. I grieved a lot. I didn't want to keep both of those things going at the same time."
Since July he's been happily holed up on the Delaware River in New York State, "where people don't watch movies," Ruffalo said. "At least, they don't watch mine." He doesn't even have phone or cell service; he talked on Skype. He spends his days sledding and ice skating with his family, taking care of their dog, cats, guinea pigs and chickens, and looking for another film to direct. "Sometimes I'll pop down to the city to see a play," he said. "I'm just resting. I want my expenses to be smaller, I want everything to be smaller if I can pull it off. I want a simple life."
To make Sympathy for Delicious - about a newly paralyzed DJ (played by Christopher Thornton, who wrote the screenplay) co-starring Linney and Orlando Bloom - Ruffalo called upon everything he'd learned while working for "masters" such as Scorsese and Fincher. "Their work has an importance to it," he said. "Good enough' isn't good enough. They're shooting for eternity." At first he was "really scared, actually terrified," that he wouldn't know how to direct. But he quickly found he was comfortable, especially with actors.
"Even more than some of the auteurs I've worked with, I know that each actor is their own organism and needs their own thing," he said. "I think I understand the language that can propel them into a performance or not. I really think acting is about getting your motor going inside. Getting turned on about the idea of the piece, connecting to it in some personal way, and getting your ego out of the way to serve the material. I try to lift myself up into the bigger ideas of a thing. I think that keeps you twisting in on yourself psychologically."
After some rocky reviews, Sympathy for Delicious scored a standing ovation from a capacity crowd of 1,300 at Sundance's biggest theatre. "That was about as good as it gets," Ruffalo said. "I had most of my filmmaker cohorts with me, and we were all able to bask in the glory of the adulation of independent cinema at its best."
He's joking, of course. He's too level-headed, and has been through too much, to be swayed by adulation. "Suffering makes us more whole, more compassionate as people," he said. "As an actor, the more you understand the human experience, the more you have to bring to your work. I don't rejoice or revel in my misfortune, nor do I see it as any greater than anybody else's. Life is tough for everybody. In the end, it's all just a gift of being, just another experience that makes you a more lived-in human being."
For now, Ruffalo's focusing on small gifts. "Our chickens just started laying eggs, and it's a miracle at my household," he said. "The kids are fighting over who gets to go out and get them." He laughed. "Of course, by the time you feed the chickens, heat them and care for them, it comes out to be about a hundred daallars an egg." But worth every penny.