You have to remember that for more than half my life - probably until my children were born - acting was everything to me. I was obsessed by it, and I spent so much time just trying to get to the point where I was being paid to do it. Literally, I spent every waking moment thinking about acting.
— Mark Ruffalo
All of us have got to pay into a certain system, and what we're saying is it's 100% American that every American should be able to create, store and sell their own energy as they see fit. Let's decentralize energy. Let's democratize energy.
A lot of people are living with mental illness around them. Either you love one or you are one.
It's a mature thing to understand that your pictures of a lifetime together with someone were... well, the reality is not what we're taught.
I want to get into some television. There might be a perception about me being only a movie actor, you know, and there's this whole new sort of frontier opening up in that medium.
What is happiness other than a negotiation between reality and your dreams? It's understanding that you give up something for something else. I feel like that's been how I've been trying to be happy, although in my DNA there's more of a depressed person.
I normally don't have that much confidence. I usually am trying to talk to directors out of giving me a job.
I love 'The Sportswriter' by Richard Ford. Ford really captures for me the bittersweetness of the quietly suffering American man. It's stoic, sad, and really beautiful.
If I'm working in the city, then as soon as I'm home, I try to lock in on my son for a few hours. Every day. I see how important it is that he's starting to come into my world now. It's just an effort to give him that male mode of being.
The fracking chemicals sit in open pits, get trucked around, or sent through pipelines that can burst. What do you think happens when frack chemicals and floods and storm swollen rivers mix?
I did a series of these soft-core horror movies called 'Mirror Mirror.' I got killed in 'em all - and each time, I came back as a different character. They were all straight-to-video.
Sometimes, as an actor, you're so deeply immersed in a part that you lose control of it. If you're really lucky, a few times in your life it'll take you somewhere you never expected to go. It really blows the top off your understanding of your craft.
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.
I did grow up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, around a lot of my mom's family. I had a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles around me, and my sisters and my brother. Probably the most formative part of it was that we grew up on the edge of a forest. It wasn't a big forest, but it was enough. When you're a kid, it feels gigantic.
What makes Hulk afraid? It's himself. It's a version of himself that's weak. It's a version of himself that's vulnerable. It's a child inside of him.
My mom was a hairdresser. My aunt was a hairdresser. My brother was a hairdresser. My sisters are hairdressers.
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.
I'd always been close to my brother. Very close.
Every piece of geopolitical strife that's happening in the world today is revolved around energy, either trying to grab resources or people using resources to fund radical groups.
My real baby is renewable energy. I feel like whoever starts to crack this nut is going to have a pretty clear shot at the White House. It's a $2 trillion business that America's being left out of.
Actors, like it or not, their voices carry deeply into the culture: people look towards them for attitudes, for right or wrong, and today, the mainstream media doesn't really balance the unheard.
I'm like a Depression-era person as far as acting goes. It's sort of like, grab it while you can and make the most of what's in front of you. The first 'Avengers' opened up a host of things that I've been struggling to get made for a long period of time.
I have mental illness in my family. I have a lot of compassion for those people.
I've been having a lot of fun with the Hulk motion-capture stuff, actually. The only distinction that I hold is that I am the only actor to ever play Banner and the Hulk.
The sculptor Frosty Myers and I met when we were bidding against each other at an auction. He's an eccentric, a liberal with a collection of rifles, and his stuff is big art. We share a love of tractors. I'm trading him one for a piece of art.
I have a very dear family and very dear friends. They're my rock. These are people who knew me from the beginning, you know, as a loser in a 1972 Dodge Dart with the bumper literally duct-taped to the body.
The laws of nature tell us there's a finite amount of any substance on the face of the earth, and at some point, that's going to run out. And if we're smart and we have some grace and we have some willingness about our destiny, then we will take ourselves into the renewable world.
I didn't apply to any colleges - I lied to all my friends and told them I was going to UCSD, because all their parents would be like, 'Mark, where're you going to college?' and I'd just lie 'cause I felt it was unrealistic to be an actor.
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 really can have your dreams and at the same time have a family. But it has to be a really deliberate practice.
I've never Googled myself on the Internet.
It seems like they conflate Bruce and the Hulk. It's usually, 'Hulk!' as I'm walking across the street. But sometimes it's 'Banner!' If you go on my Twitter feed, you'll see it's mostly Hulk. I think it was pretty spectacular what we were able to accomplish with CGI with 'The Hulk,' and I can't take full credit for that.
It's been up, down, and sideways for me, man. I could become a huge star, or I could get cancer tomorrow.
Whatever we want to think about American business - work hard, tell the truth, have morality - it's a myth. There's a lot of graft.
I'd never taken a job purely for money - I felt that would kill me - but I was afraid that I was heading that way. Then, my brother passing away was the final thing that kicked me over. It reminded me that life is short, and you'd better do what you want while you have a chance.
I think where people get into trouble is hiding and feeling ashamed about what they don't have any control over in the first place.
My mom was a hairstylist, but she quit doing that to raise the kids - there were four of us. There was no money.
When I left my Catholic school, I was around 10 or 11 years old, and it started to unravel for me there. Kids pick up on things if you're interested and inquisitive. I was seeing things that were not in line with what I'd been taught about Jesus. It didn't jive with me.
As an actor, you can do everything. I grew up in the theater, and you could do a musical, a comedy, a tragedy.
I'm a very hands-on father. I like being a hands-on father. I am probably more like one of my kids in my family, but the dominating kid.
I have two hammocks, one Mayan and one Guatemalan, both family size because I like to lie in them perpendicular. When I'm working on a character, I lie in them and daydream. They're the best tools for working that I have.
My surfboard is a 7-foot-3-inch spoon made by Rip Curl, kind of between a longboard and a shortboard. Surfing brings me into the here and now. It's a dance with the present.
It's imperative that we opt out of the fossil fuel endgame.
I woke up one morning with the knowledge that I had a brain tumor. It wasn't so much that I dreamt I had a brain tumor; it was like someone just poured the knowledge into my head. It wasn't like an image; it was just like knowing. It was so weird, which is why I paid attention.
I was probably 8 years old; my mom let me stay up one night. She's like, 'You have to see this movie.' It was 'A Streetcar Named Desire,' and it was on TV, and it was a big deal. And I saw Marlon Brando, and I was like, 'Oh, my God.' That's where it started.
I never used to get photographed and people asking for autographs. I don't mind the autographs, but the paparazzi I find weird. As an actor, you want to be able to regard the world instead of having it regard you.
I was an introverted kid; I liked my time alone. And the rest of my family is pretty extroverted, so I felt like a bit of an oddball. They're very gregarious and charming and charismatic people. I always felt like I was struggling as a young person. I think everyone was very surprised to hear that I wanted to be an actor.
I don't like to go to the gym very much if I can help it.
For the longest time, I was Scott Ruffalo's brother. I mean, he was the mayor of Beverly Hills. He was just so beloved there.
I don't have to be a leading man. I can be a character actor. That's really what interests me anyway.
