Mark Ruffalo

• 1. Introduction

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  Mark Ruffalo has been nominated four times for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, which ties a record. Each nomination came for a different kind of man. Ruffalo is an American actor and producer, and the road to that record was not smooth. It ran through years of unglamorous work, a medical scare, and a family loss that remains unsolved. How does an actor with that history become the person directors call when they want warmth, menace or chaos? And why does a performer so often cast as decent keep stepping into public arguments off screen?

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• 2. Three Religions, One House

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  Mark Alan Ruffalo was born on the 22nd of November 1967 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His mother, Marie Rose, worked as a hairdresser and stylist. His father, Frank Lawrence Ruffalo Jr., was a construction painter. He grew up with two sisters, Tanya Marie and Nicole, and a brother named Scott. Tanya Marie died in 2023.

  The family tree was crowded with traditions. His father's side was Italian, from Girifalco in Calabria. His mother was of French Canadian and Italian ancestry. His father followed the Baháʼí faith, while his mother was Christian. Ruffalo has said he grew up "in a household that had three religions in it, (born-again) Christianity, Catholicism and Baháʼísm". He remembers a lot of debate. He also remembers deciding that his grandmother, his father and his mother were each as valid as the others. In his words, "none of them, my grandmother, my father or my mother, was better or worse than the other."

  His schooling mixed Catholic and progressive classrooms. He calls himself a "happy kid", though he struggled with dyslexia and ADHD that nobody diagnosed at the time. In his teens he lived in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where his father was working. He wrestled in junior high and high school, first in Wisconsin and then in Virginia.

  At First Colonial High School he acted with the Patriot Playhouse, and he graduated in 1986. His family then moved to San Diego, California, and later to Los Angeles. There he studied at the Stella Adler Conservatory and co-founded the Orpheus Theatre Company. With that troupe he wrote, directed and starred in a number of plays, all while working as a bartender for close to a decade.

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• 3. Stage Roots

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  A single episode of CBS Summer Playhouse in 1989 gave Ruffalo his first screen credit. Minor film parts followed. In 1994 he played Vinnie Webber, a small character in an episode of the Canadian-broadcast series Due South. That same year came his film debut in the horror picture Mirror, Mirror II: Raven Dance, followed in 1995 by Mirror, Mirror III: The Voyeur.

  The theatre was where his name began to circulate. In 1996 he played Warren Straub in the original off-Broadway cast of Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth, opposite Josh Hamilton and Missy Yager. Lonergan was a founding member of Naked Angels, a theatre company Ruffalo also belonged to.

  Small film work continued, including The Dentist in 1996, the crime comedy Safe Men in 1998, and Ang Lee's Civil War western Ride with the Devil in 1999. Then Lonergan cast him again, this time on film. In You Can Count on Me, released in 2000, Ruffalo played the brother of Laura Linney's character. The film drew two Academy Award nominations. Reviewers compared Ruffalo to the young Marlon Brando, and he won awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the Montreal World Film Festival.

  Broadway arrived in 2006 with Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing! at the Belasco Theatre in New York. Ruffalo played Moe Axelrod alongside Lauren Ambrose, Pablo Schreiber and Zoe Wanamaker. A critic for The New York Times called him "the soulful movie and stage actor making his Broadway debut here." Another, writing in Variety, praised how he turned "prickly charm into a proud man who uses glib aggression to camouflage his frustration." The role earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play.

  He returned to Broadway in 2017 for a revival of Arthur Miller's The Price at the American Airlines Theatre, with Danny DeVito and Tony Shalhoub. Variety's Marilyn Stasio noted the "warmth in their tones and mutual respect in their exchange of confidences."

  Ruffalo also stepped behind the camera. After directing plays at Orpheus, he made his feature directing debut in 2010 with the indie film Sympathy for Delicious. He starred in it with Juliette Lewis and Laura Linney. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Special Jury Prize.

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• 4. The Years of Loss

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  The Last Castle, released in 2001, cast Ruffalo as a bookie in a military prison alongside Robert Redford. He later described the part as "seminal to me". Right after finishing that film, he was diagnosed with a vestibular schwannoma, a brain tumor also called an acoustic neuroma.

  The tumor turned out to be benign. The surgery to remove it was another matter. It left him with partial facial paralysis and damaged his hearing. The paralysis faded after a year, but Ruffalo remains deaf in his left ear.

  He had married Sunrise Coigney in 2000, and the couple have three children.

  On the 1st of December 2008, his younger brother Scott was found outside his home on North Palm Drive in Beverly Hills. He had an execution-style bullet wound to the head. Scott was taken to a hospital and died the following week. The case remains officially unsolved.

  A Saudi woman named Shaha Mishaal Adham, then 26 years old, was initially charged. She was released from the Beverly Hills jail for what police records describe as "insufficient evidence, per the warrant". Her lawyer stated that Scott Ruffalo had been playing with the gun.

  Today Ruffalo and his family live in Sullivan County, New York. He describes the Catskills as his "home".

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• 5. Range on Screen

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  After The Last Castle, supporting roles piled up. They included XX/XY in 2002, Isabel Coixet's My Life Without Me, John Woo's Windtalkers and Jane Campion's In the Cut in 2003, and We Don't Live Here Anymore in 2004.

  Then came the romantic years. View from the Top, in 2003, put him opposite Gwyneth Paltrow. In 2004 he starred with Jennifer Garner in 13 Going on 30, which has since become a cult classic. That same year, in Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he played Stan, a technician who erases people's memories of each other. Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey starred in that film.

  In Michael Mann's Collateral, also from 2004, he played a narcotics detective alongside Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise. Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote that he gave "an extra dimension of intelligence to what initially looks like a stock cop role."

  He starred with Reese Witherspoon in Just Like Heaven in 2005, adapted from Marc Levy's French novel If Only It Were True. Rumor Has It, a Rob Reiner comedy, followed the same year, with Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Costner and Shirley MacLaine.

  In March 2007, David Fincher's Zodiac gave him a very different part. Ruffalo played Dave Toschi, the San Francisco police homicide inspector who ran the hunt for the Zodiac killer from 1969 through most of the 1970s. Roger Ebert wrote that Ruffalo played him "as a dogged officer who does things by the book because he believes in the book". Toschi was the role model for the Clint Eastwood film Dirty Harry.

  The same year he played Dwight Arno, a divorced lawyer who accidentally kills a child and speeds away, in Reservation Road. In 2008 he played a con man in The Brothers Bloom and appeared in Blindness. A brief turn in Where the Wild Things Are followed in 2009.

  In 2010 he was U.S. Marshal Chuck Aule in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, partner to Leonardo DiCaprio's Teddy Daniels. That year he also starred in Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right with Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. Ruffalo had approached Cholodenko after seeing her film High Art and told her he wanted to work with her. Years later she phoned to say she had written a script with him in mind. The role brought him his first Academy Award nomination.

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• 6. The Green Giant

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  In The Avengers, released in 2012 as the sixth Marvel Cinematic Universe film, Ruffalo took over as Dr. Bruce Banner and the Hulk from Edward Norton. He also played the monster through motion capture. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called him better than the earlier Hulks played by Eric Bana and Norton. He wrote that Ruffalo made the characters "even droll" and located the creature's secret in "depression and self-hate" rather than anger management.

  The role kept returning. Ruffalo reprised it in Iron Man 3 in 2013 and Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015. Thor: Ragnarok followed in 2017, then Avengers: Infinity War in 2018. In 2019 he appeared in both Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings arrived in 2021, and the Disney+ series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law in 2022.

  The franchise also gave him a reputation off screen. He became known for spoiling the ending of Avengers: Infinity War a full year before its release. He did it again with Avengers: Endgame a few weeks before it opened.

  Marvel colleagues have turned up in his later projects. In 2026 he acted opposite Chris Hemsworth in the crime thriller Crime 101. In May 2025 he was added to the cast of Good Sex with Natalie Portman, announced as a Netflix release for 2026. In August 2025 it was confirmed that he would play Bruce Banner again in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, with a theatrical release announced for July 2026.

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• 7. Transformations

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  In 2014 HBO adapted Larry Kramer's AIDS-era play The Normal Heart, and Ruffalo played the activist Ned Weeks. The performance earned an Emmy nomination and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actor. He said the response from viewers was the most sincere and vulnerable he had received on social media. Reflecting on his career, he said "I did okay as far as my career goes, because that's a gift."

  The same year, Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher gave him a second Academy Award nomination. He played the wrestler Dave Schultz, with Steve Carell, Channing Tatum and Vanessa Redgrave. Bradshaw wrote that Tatum and Ruffalo gave "the most compelling portrayal of brothers since Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro in Scorsese's Raging Bull."

  In 2015 he played a father with bipolar disorder in the independent comedy Infinitely Polar Bear, which earned a Golden Globe nomination. Also in 2015, he played the Boston journalist Michael Rezendes in Spotlight, with Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery and Liev Schreiber. It brought his third Academy Award nomination and a BAFTA nomination. He told The Hollywood Reporter that he studied Rezendes closely. "I had meals with him," he said, and "I watched him work the phones."

  In 2020 he played identical twins Dominick and Thomas Birdsey in the HBO limited series I Know This Much Is True, and he was an executive producer. Variety's Daniel D'Addario called it "his two-man show". The performance won him the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor.

  In 2023 he joined Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things, with Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival. Entertainment Weekly's Maureen Lee Lenker noted that he "built a career playing solid, decent men" and relished the chance to play a man whose ego was "the size of an entire continent". The part earned Critics' Choice, Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations. That same year he played Daniel LeBlanc in the Netflix miniseries All the Light We Cannot See, based on Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer Prize winning novel.

  On the 8th of February 2024 he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, joined by his wife and the two elder of their three children.

  In 2025 he played Kenneth Marshall in Bong Joon-ho's Mickey 17, with Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun and Toni Collette. He also starred in the HBO crime drama Task, whose critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes called his work "superb". In May 2026 it was announced that he will voice Nero in the Pixar animated film Gatto, due in 2027.

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• 8. Causes and Convictions

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  In 2008, Ruffalo grew worried that gas companies were eyeing his family's land in Callicoon, New York. After investigating on his own, he became what New York magazine called "anti-fracking's first famous face". On the 4th of October 2010 he discussed hydraulic fracturing and the FRAC Act of 2009 on The Rachel Maddow Show.

  A month later he made a more startling claim. In the December 2010 issue of GQ he said he had been placed on a terror advisory list after organizing Pennsylvania screenings of Gasland, a documentary about natural-gas drilling. The Pennsylvania Governor's Office of Homeland Security denied it.

  In March 2016 he narrated and produced Dear President Obama: The Clean Energy Revolution Is Now, a Jon Bowermaster documentary on President Barack Obama's environmental record. In October 2017 he backed the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation against the Dakota Access Pipeline. In 2019 he starred in and co-produced Dark Waters, directed by Todd Haynes. He played Robert Bilott, a corporate lawyer who relentlessly pursued the chemical giant DuPont over poisonous pollution.

  His politics have been just as public. In the 2016 Democratic primaries he supported Bernie Sanders, then endorsed Hillary Clinton. He endorsed Sanders again for 2020, and Kamala Harris in 2024. He also endorsed Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 and 2019 UK general elections, tweeting that Corbyn offered an alternative to "the Corporate status quo".

  At the 83rd Golden Globe Awards, on the 11th of January 2026, Ruffalo wore a pin reading "Be Good". He said it was a protest over the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. "I love this country," he told a red carpet interviewer, "and what I'm seeing here is not America."

  In 2015 he joined the Education Is Not a Crime campaign, alongside Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other Nobel Peace laureates. It drew attention to the Iranian government's denial of university education to young Baháʼís, members of the faith his father followed.

  His most local cause is a building. In 2023 he tried to block the sale of the West Park Presbyterian Church, a city landmark from the 1880s near his home. The congregation said it could not afford to maintain the deteriorating building and wanted the proceeds for charity work. An independent analysis in October 2023 found repairs would be very expensive. The congregation temporarily withdrew its demolition application in January 2024.

  In June 2025 the New York Court of Appeals ruled that the church's community center, the Center at West Park, could be evicted. A final eviction notice followed in July. In October 2025, Manhattan Community Board 7 voted to recommend against demolition. The Landmarks Preservation Commission then scheduled a hearing that December to decide whether demolition would be approved.

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