How Mark Ruffalo approached bipolar role
Mark Ruffalo adds another strong character to his resumé with Infinitely Polar Bear’s Cam Stuart, the father of two young girls struggling with the highs and lows of his bipolar disorder, determined to keep his marriage and family together.
Set in late 1970s Boston, Stuart is living at a halfway house after being hospitalized and nervously steps in to look after his kids solo when wife Maggie (Zoe Saldana) gets a chance to finish her business degree in New York.
The story is based on writer-director Maya Forbes’s own childhood; her father helped Ruffalo find the heart of his character: a frank, hilariously irresponsible and heartbreaking man motivated by love of family.
He’s also executive producer on this film, signing on after he read Forbes’ book and then her script. “I love this movie,” he said he told Forbes, offering to “wait in the wings” until other “big name” actors were approached to star.
“She said ‘no, let’s make this happen. I want you for it,’ ” Ruffalo told the Star.
Ruffalo had this to say about the movie and his character:
Cam: “I just wish I hadn’t dressed like a big, green bug.”
“I have people in my family who are bipolar so I know intimately what that’s like and about . . . you either are one or you love one. There’s so many people with, I don’t even want to call it a mental illness, it just sounds so negative, an illness. It’s more of a disability people need to learn to manage and Cam did manage it. I had a lot of Cam’s stuff; I had a lot of his clothes, all the things in his apartment. They emptied out his storage locker . . . and seeing his (home movie) films, that’s what gave me the manic and that really helped a lot. It was such an insight into who he was.
Maggie and the girls visit Cam in the hospital
“Cam taught me to be Cam and the stories that Maya (Forbes) was telling were mostly how I found Cam and the lithium scene (when Cam is rendered unrecognizable and heavily sedated while in a psychiatric unit) was literally a story that she told me verbatim and she showed me how his hands would shake all the time when he was on lithium. It was heartbreak- ing, especially when you see how vibrant the person is.”
Being a dad helped him play the father, negotiating with the girls
Screen daughters Amelia (Imogene Wolodarsky, daughter of writerdirector Forbes) and Faith (Ashley Aufderheide) are close in age to Ruffalo’s girls Bella Noche, 10 and Odette, 8. He also has a 13-year-old son, Keen.
“It’s oddly not very much different than the relationship I have with my kids, the relationship Cam has with the girls, strangely or maybe not so strangely. It has its positives and has its drawbacks, that kind of parenting. There’s been times when my wife has gone off to work or to do her own thing and it’s been a handful.
“I am by no means a perfect parent. I can be (fun), but at times I’ll snap and yell and lose my temper and I’m not too authoritarian with my kids, that’s just not my style. I don’t know what the best way is to raise kids and I don’t pretend to know. What that invites is a certain kind of dialogue. And the damnedest things come out of a kid’s (mouth) when they can negotiate about fairness.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.