‘I Know This Much Is True’ – Ruffalo shines as tortured twin brothers
Dominick Birdsey is a man with a mountain of baggage.
As played by Mark Ruffalo (“The Normal Heart,” “Foxcatcher”) in the HBO limited series “I Know This Much Is True,” a sixepisode drama premiering Sunday, May 10, he’s a house painter in rural Connecticut circa 1990 who is coping with his own psychic wounds as he cares for an identical twin brother with paranoid schizophrenia.
And that malady rears itself in the series’ opening frames, when Thomas (also Ruffalo) hacks off his hand to the horror of onlookers in a public library in what in his mind is a sacrifice to stop the Gulf War. He’s soon sent to an asylum, where his brother fights to get him freed.
Dominick isn’t all that well, either. He’s buckling under the weight of PTSD, the result of looking after Thomas, a childhood with an abusive stepfather, memories of losing his infant daughter to SIDS and subsequent divorce from Dessa (Kathryn Hahn, “Transparent”) and making sure his dying mother (Melissa Leo, “Frozen River”) has proper hospice care.
As Dominick contends with an asylum social worker (Rosie O’Donnell) to gain his brother’s release, a psychologist (Archie Panjabi, “The Good Wife”) picks up on his considerable emotional pain and realizes she may have two patients instead of one.
For the dual roles, Ruffalo undertook unusual demands. First, he shot all his scenes as the svelte, goateed Dominick, then took five weeks off to gain 30 pounds to play the doughy, clean-shaven Thomas. It was also during this time that the 52-year-old actor researched mental illness and imagined himself as someone with Thomas’ condition.
“When we were talking about how we would do it,” Ruffalo explained to a recent gathering of journalists in Pasadena, Calif., “we didn’t want it to be like I run and put a wig on, and then run and do the same scene on the same day. So, yeah, we took five weeks off to really separate these two guys.
“And Thomas was on a lot of medication,” he continues. “He needs medications. These mood stabilizers and antipsychotics cause people to put on weight. And, yeah ... their life experiences after their teens are so extremely different. But it was important for us to really, really have these guys be two different people.”
And each came with its own distinct challenges, Ruffalo says, but Thomas’ were especially daunting.
“Actually putting on the weight for Thomas was really challenging,” he says. “I didn’t expect it to be. I thought I was going to be having a fun time doing that. And when you’re forcefeeding yourself, some of the romance of food sort of leaves.
“I mean, listen, there’s an element of mental illness in this project,” he continues. “And you want to be as honest as you can to that, especially today. And it means a lot to me to be honest with that, which means going into that world and getting to know it and getting comfortable with it. And that’s challenging.
“And so, that aspect of it was challenging more so than Dominick. I was really afraid to play it to be honest with you. I think it’s really an important issue and I want to tell it as honestly as possible. And so the responsibility that was on the actual playing it was really apparent to me.”