LOS ANGELES -- Mark Ruffalo is sitting alone in the back of Victor's Deli in late afternoon sun, a weekday, the place dead. He is wearing a blue velour jacket, jeans and a loose, white button shirt. The silver chain around his neck holds a St. Christopher medal, patron saint of protection. He is rumpled, hair and clothes, like he just came out of the dryer. He waves hello.
Not too long ago, during the decade he spent as a struggling actor in Los Angeles, this was the kind of place where Ruffalo punched a time clock. He was a busboy at the faux-'50s malt shop Ed Debevic's, where 10-year-old girls like to have their birthday parties, the Beverly Hills version of Chuck E. Cheese. He was a waiter, doorman, caterer, bartender at a series of now-shuttered watering holes where he slung martinis and Midori cocktails to the Hollywood swells. He also painted houses. And dug holes and stuck plants in the ground, and thought a lot about going back to Wisconsin to work for his dad, where he would make a new life sandblasting water towers.
"For all those years it felt like Los Angeles just didn't get me," says Ruffalo.
(Jonathan Alcorn For The Washington Post)
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He acted in more than 30 plays over 10 years. At the bars he worked, Ruffalo would hand fliers to customers; they never came to see him on the stage. "You're totally invisible," he remembers. "You're just a conduit between them and a drink. Like a drug dealer. Of course, 99 percent of what people say in bars is absolute crap. Girls come to understand this rather quickly."
Ruffalo laughs; he laughs a lot, a slurry heheheheh. It is a good thing he didn't quit because now he is one of the most interesting actors working in Hollywood -- appearing currently in both the Michael Mann thriller "Collateral" and "We Don't Live Here Anymore," an intense film based on the short stories of Andre Dubus, opening in Washington on Friday, in which he cheats on his wife (Laura Dern) with his best friend's spouse (Naomi Watts).
Maybe because he was trained in the theater, Ruffalo, 36, can actually act, and his work in even mediocre films is often singled out. He repeats a mantra: You serve the material. He possesses the craft to disappear into his characters, and some of them are not very appealing, but they are not dull.
Ruffalo -- say "rough," not "roof" -- broke into the public consciousness by going east, earning an off-Broadway rave as a slouchy, funny, nihilistic brat in Kenneth Lonergan's play "This Is Our Youth" in 1997. A New York critic compared Ruffalo to a young Marlon Brando. That's the kind of press that changes a career. Ruffalo followed it with the lead in Lonergan's film "You Can Count on Me" (2000) for his turn as Terry, the sweet and infuriating slacker, muddle-headed but big of heart, a boy-man, lost but redeemable. The kind of man women cook eggs for in the morning. After that, in quick succession, he worked beside Robert Redford in "The Last Castle" and Nicolas Cage in "Windtalkers."
Then, just as he began to orbit, Ruffalo plunged back to Earth. It was almost like a movie: The talented young man had a dream, a very bad dream, that something was growing inside his head. And when the surgeons laid him out on the cold table, and opened his skull, they found that he was quite right. He had a brain tumor that was, mercifully, pronounced benign. He is okay now. But he is also a changed man. And, he thinks, probably a better artist for it. But what a way to learn.
He orders lemonade with ice tea. "I can't bring myself to call it an Arnold Palmer," he says.
He comes from a family of hairdressers: mother, two sisters, a brother. Stylists all. His dad, divorced from mom, runs a commercial painting company. To describe Ruffalo as good-looking doesn't do it. He is handsome in the Italian way, lean and lithe and hairy, dark meat to Brad Pitt's white, with a Roman nose and a full mouth and emotive eyes that, in his movie roles, register confusion and wound and hunger.
"For all those years it felt like Los Angeles just didn't get me," he says. "This one casting director told me they don't look for guys like you out here in L.A. They look for guys like you in New York. I don't know. My look or quality. Out here, maybe episodic TV turns out a beautiful, easily accessible type. I was blue-collar street-fighter type. The darker tones, you know? That's what they said." He pauses and seems to think about that last statement. "Although you never really know what anybody is talking about. That's one of the problems with language."
In his press clips, he is often referred to as the thinking woman's sex symbol, and in his role as the New York detective in Jane Campion's kinky "In the Cut" (2003), he gives good reason for the rep when he sets upon co-star Meg Ryan like a starving man at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
He was born in Kenosha, a little burg in Wisconsin. His father was kind of a schemer-dreamer, and the family moved first to Virginia Beach, and then to the margins of San Diego, which Ruffalo remembers as not the sunny Republican idyll but a tough beach town filled with burnouts and crystal meth. As a teenager, Ruffalo was more skate punk than drama club, raised on the Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks and the Clash.
Ruffalo didn't go to college; he went instead to the Stella Adler Academy, the well-regarded acting school in Los Angeles that trained Robert De Niro and Chris Cooper. It is a three-year program; he spent six years with Adler and paid for his classes with work-study. He spent the extra years "really just hiding." He says, "I cleaned toilets." Benicio Del Toro was the star pupil.
Ruffalo does a nice imitation of his mentor, now deceased. "Natural is boring, darlink," he mimics Adler. "Never pull the character down to your level. You lift yourself up! Don't be small don't do it, darlink. You must serve the material."
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