Mark Ruffalo
Mark Ruffalo
Mark Alan Ruffalo is an American actor, director, humanitarian, social activist, and film producer. He made his screen debut in an episode of CBS Summer Playhouse, followed by minor film roles. He was part of the original cast of This Is Our Youth, for which he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. Following was his roles in 13 Going on 30, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Zodiac, and What Doesn't Kill You. In 2010, he starred in the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth22 November 1967
CityKenosha, WI
CountryUnited States of America
When you're a young actor, and you're really fighting to have your place in the world - for me, anyway - it took a mental focus and energy and striving. It took a long time. And it was my whole life.
It's not my favorite genre, generally, ... But I want to do it. I wanted to try my hand at it, because I was hearing around town, people saying that I couldn't do it. 'Mark Ruffalo can't do comedy. Mark Ruffalo can't be a romantic lead.' And so I was like, 'Those are fighting words, my friend.'
Even if my movies weren't big blockbusters, directors generally liked me, so they would fight for me.
That was an interesting aspect: to go to war with the Church to fight for the very thing that the Church was meant to give to people
When you have to fight for the things you love, you have to measure the value of those things in ways you may not in any other way.
No great undertaking ever looks like it's winnable. That only comes later and only if you are lucky and are willing to fight and have a group of folks around you that are willing to do the same thing, too.
Graduates, I'm asking each of you, at some point, to act up, be misbehaved. Buck the system. Fight for what you believe in. This is the time to do it. You're the ones to do it. Your world, is like no other generation, you actually get to create the world that you can imagine.
It really is the relationship you have with your self that presents the key to the “kingdom”, so to speak... Fighting is good, but not when it is fighting yourself. Changing the world is good but first one has to start inside and concurrently make that place right. The strife and the ugliness in the world is the outward manifestation of this troubled relationship we have within on a whole.
You value the thing you are fighting for, but then you learn to value the time it takes to do it and the time you have off. Both of which are precious.
When you get to be a 45-year-old man, you start to realize: 'I know who I am, and I know who I'm not. I know my shortcomings, I know my strengths; maybe some of my shortcomings are my strengths.' You start to face yourself as you truly are.
Witherspoon is a blazingly intelligent and talented actress.
With indies, all they have is their script and it's very important to them. The characters are better drawn, the stories more precise and the experience greater than with studio films where sometimes they fill in the script as they're shooting.
With social media, you have this new kind of way to communicate with people that's very immediate, sometimes alarmingly so, sometimes painfully so. If you could just hold some objectivity, a very direct, unfiltered, raw reflection of the way something is landing in the culture without any spin, or filtration, or anything, it's very raw.
You get sick and s- goes wrong and you're bonked - you don't know where you're going to end up, how it's gonna turn out, ... That sort of thing changes you, the way you live your life. It teaches you to take less and less for granted.