RUFFALO GOES BIG AGAIN
I KEEP FINDING MYSELF IN THIS RELATIONSHIP WITH THESE EXTREMES
Three-time Oscar nominee Mark Ruffalo, known globally as Marvel superhero the Hulk, has recently joined HBO’s highly anticipated sixpart series I Know This Much Is True. The show, which features a star-studded cast that includes Kathryn Hahn, Melissa Leo, Juliette Lewis and Rosie O’Donnell, is now streaming on HBO GO.
I Know This Much Is True is an emotional high drama about family bonds and mental illness adapted from Wally Lamb’s bestseller novel of the same name by writer/director Derek Cianfrance, previously known from his impressive directorial films like Blue Valentine and The
Place Beyond The Pines. The new show stars Ruffalo playing a dual role as identical twin brothers Dominick and Thomas Birdsey in a family saga that follows their parallel lives in an epic story of betrayal, sacrifice and forgiveness. The show also marks Cianfrance’s first TV series and the first for Ruffalo in 20 years.
“Yeah, this is a dedication to our siblings. I mean, this was a labour of love, we made this as a story about family and we made it as intimately and as honestly and as kind of nakedly as we possibly could,” said Cianfrance during a roundtable interview conducted via video conference last week.
“And, you know, both of us [Ruffalo and himself ] and our families had dealt with these kinds of tragedies and it became clear to us as we were making it that we should pay tribute to our loved ones as we made the film. And one of the things that inspired us to want to make something like this in the first place was Mark and I are both brothers and I think those bonds of family are just so important to us. And it was our hope also that people who also had lost loved ones could also project their own tributes of their own lost loved ones into the film.”
Ruffalo has been a big fan of Cianfrance’s work since he watched Blue Valentine years ago. And when the two first met each other at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010, they immediately were simpatico.
“You know I just immediately loved the guy. And then we talked he told me that he’d offered me Blue Valentine, but I was doing a romantic comedy instead. And I cringed at that,” laughed Ruffalo from his house in upstate New York. “But, you know, we sort of made a promise that one day we’d work together. And so, when the moment came, I kept that promise.”
Ruffalo, who stars in and executive-produces the series, was the one who optioned film rights for the book and went on to discuss the possibilities of making the series with HBO himself.
“I guess part of it is a world that I understand in this blue-collar world that I grew up in. My family started as house painters and became construction painters. They were Italian immigrants and I’m second-generation Italian. There’s a family dynamic that’s very intense as masculinity, that we learned as Italians, as American males with those dimensions and the family dimension. All of those things just felt very real and honest,” said Ruffalo.
“And I wanted to tell a story that had all those things in a time that just feels hysterical and cynical, and tongue in cheek and ironic. I wanted something really earthy, and this felt like that, and really immediate, approachable and accessible to all different kinds of people. And this felt like that, not to mention a goddamn hardcore acting challenge.”
Ruffalo’s probably right. Working on the new series could have been one of his most challenging performances yet, especially his transformation in order to play two different characters. The production of I Know This Much Is True started in April 2019, which begins with Ruffalo playing Dominick, a divorced construction worker who’s trying to get his paranoid schizophrenic twin brother released from an institution. He then had another six weeks of cheeseburger-eating in order to put on 14kg before returning to set as Thomas, whose mental illness spirals out of control after the death of their mother.
“We didn’t want CGI or a technical movie,” said the director. “And we didn’t want to shoot it with a green screen. We didn’t really know if it was going to work.
But that was why we had to do it, to see if we could make these two guys work in the same scene together.”
After all, this isn’t the first time Ruffalo has played two characters in one. Though it isn’t exactly the same, he did that sort of persona once with the Hulk.
“Well, for these dichotomies, I keep finding myself in this relationship with these extremes. And part of it is just luck, part of it is my own interest, and maybe something I’m working on myself of these really disparate qualities inside of us. And then coming to peace with them and making them whole,” said Ruffalo.
“And, you know, the Hulk is like the comic-book version of that. Certainly the journey that Banner and Hulk have taken with those movies, up until now, has been that journey of kind of finding all this. But this series also has a version of that as well. You know, the light in the dark; the soft twin and the hard twin; the anger and the joy or anger and peace. We’re all constantly living in this duality, that’s the whole nature of life. So it’s really like a distilled version of this struggle told in the story of twins that I think was interesting and kind of beautiful to make that journey with these two guys together.”
With I Know This Much Is True, both Ruffalo and Cianfrance believed the story would be a great way to empathise with people whose experiences you are unfamiliar with, and one of the best ways to understand more of people who live with mental illness.
“I guess just how difficult it is to live with the constant barrage of negative voices. And how difficult it is to concentrate, how difficult it is to discern between what’s real and what isn’t. When there’s constant change that’s going on,” said Ruffalo.
“Listen, I have to add. It’s only something that I think I could understand, only in the smallest fraction. What I learned is that you can live a life with this disability. There is treatment and there are people that can help you. And you know, as a society, we don’t understand it, so we’re afraid of it. It’s behaviour that can be astonishing to us, disturbing to us. But once you’re inside of it, you really understand and have a lot of sympathy for and compassion for people who are living with these kinds of mental illnesses.”