AN ACTOR PREPARES
Ruffalo packed on weight and explored mental illness for dual role
I Know This Much Is True Streaming, Crave
Mark Ruffalo readily admits his reluctance to do what was required for his latest role — playing a pair of twin brothers in HBO’S new drama I Know This Much Is True. It was not, as one might perhaps expect, the considerable technical challenges of playing twins, one of whom suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, that concerned him.
He just wasn’t keen on gaining more than 25 pounds in five weeks.
“I kept trying to get Derek (Cianfrance, writer-director of the sixpart miniseries) to change the plan,” he says. “I told him, ‘You can get really good fat suits now.’”
But, on his director’s orders, the 52-year-old actor committed to his art. “The strategy was just to eat a bunch of carbs — lots of pasta, bread, doughnuts, ice cream — all the stuff that makes me really puffy.”
Getting paid to be a glutton might sound like fun. But apparently not. “I got heartburn from almost everything,” he says. “I had to sleep sitting up because I had such bad indigestion. In the end, all I could really keep down was oatmeal. So I’d eat bowls and bowls of oatmeal, with butter, maple syrup and heavy cream.”
Today, speaking on Zoom from his home in the Catskills in New York, Ruffalo appears to be back to his fighting weight. “But I felt like a foie gras goose,” he laughs.
Adapted from the 1998 novel by Wally Lamb, the family saga follows the fortunes of the Birdsey brothers, born in New England circa 1950. From the outset, Dominick and Thomas endure trauma and volatility, their unnamed and absent father replaced by a cruel, cold stepfather (played by John Procaccino) who dominates their timid mother (Melissa Leo).
By the time the brothers reach college, the always-sensitive Thomas displays signs of instability. At 40, he chops off his own hand, in a bloody and delusional protest against the first Gulf War.
Dominick, who has spent his adult life protecting and supporting his brother, has suffered his own considerable traumas, including the death of his infant daughter. Though the series is set in 1990s Connecticut, flashbacks to the twins’ boyhood, college years and earlier adult lives chart Thomas’s descent into mental illness, and Dominick’s valiant, but increasingly futile, attempts to protect him.
The biggest challenge was shooting the parts where both brothers are in the same scene.
This could not have been done without the help of fellow actor Gabe Fazio. For the first 13 weeks, Ruffalo played Dominick and Fazio stood in as Thomas. Then Ruffalo went off for his five-week oatmeal splurge, while also “going down into the heart of this mental illness, studying it, and imagining that life — hearing voices, being heavily medicated for years.”
Then Cianfrance resumed shooting, with a slimmed-down Fazio — who had lost the same weight as Ruffalo gained — now playing Dominick and Ruffalo playing Thomas. When putting together the scenes that featured both brothers, the director used minimal CGI, relying primarily on camera angles, and cutting down the number of scenes in which the brothers had physical contact.
Growing up first in Wisconsin, then Virginia, Ruffalo moved to Los Angeles in his early 20s, founded a theatre group and spent several years putting on plays in small auditoriums.
Though he has since followed the well-trodden A-list path into the Marvel Universe, playing Bruce Banner/hulk in the Avengers franchise, Ruffalo has also won acclaim for his more emotionally complex work, including an Emmy nomination for his performance in the TV adaptation of the AIDS drama The Normal Heart, and an Oscar nomination for his role as a journalist in Spotlight.
“I want to be the kind of artist who can’t be labelled, who surprises people and surprises myself, and sometimes f---s it up and sometimes makes it work,” he says of his choices.
Ruffalo is aware that the harrowing and heartbreaking series is airing when most of us need our spirits lifting, not dampening. But he believes the Birdsey brothers’ story is pertinent. “A pandemic like this strips away all of the trappings and busyness of our lives and leaves us with what really is of value, and that’s family,” he says. “But family is also difficult and brings challenges, and exposes all our vulnerabilities and our weaknesses.”
A pandemic like this strips away all of the trappings and busyness of our lives and leaves us with what really is of value, and that’s family.