Mark Ruffalo had a hard time playing a ‘Brahmin, blue-blood Bostonian’
For the Hulk star, it’s easier to turn green than blue.
Mark Ruffalo has played a lot of different roles over the years, but there’s one character type he still has trouble nailing down: the blue-blood Bostonian.
The actor was in Boston on Wednesday for a roundtable chat to promote his new movie Infinitely Polar Bear, and he spoke about the difficulty he had getting into character.
In the film, Ruffalo plays Cam, a bipolar dad struggling to take care of his daughters after his estranged wife leaves for New York to pursue a business degree. The story is based on director-writer Maya Forbes’s childhood growing up in 1970s Cambridge under the care of her father, a member of one of Boston’s traditional, upper-class families.
“I have family members who are bipolar, and there’s mental illness in my family, and depression as well, so I felt like I knew that part,’’ Ruffalo said. “But what was more difficult for me was the Brahmin, blue-blood Bostonian. Maya’s family came over in the Mayflower a couple hundred years ago, and my family basically rode a boat here like four years ago, so that part was really different for me.’’
Mark Ruffalo in a scene from ‘Infinitely Polar Bear.’
Ruffalo has played Boston characters before, including a stint as a South Boston street tough in 2008’s What Doesn’t Kill You as well as an upcoming role as Boston Globe investigative reporter Michael Rezendes in the soon-to-be releasedSpotlight film.
While the actor is comfortable playing your everyday Bostonian, Ruffalo said he has trouble relating to the city’s upper-class citizens.
“The blue-collar part of Boston I feel very comfortable in, it’s the blue-blood part that I just don’t, other than Maya who is several generations away, I haven’t really come into contact with,’’ Ruffalo said. “It’s just a whole way of looking at the world that’s very alien to me. There’s a lot of weird, strange rules, and seeing the world through a filter of class that I didn’t understand. Only looking up I could understand, but I couldn’t understand the looking down part.’’
Ruffalo said being a part of the city’s high-society lifestyle put a lot of pressure on his character Cam and contributed to his mental-health issues.
“He can go from changing the oil on a broken down car in one moment and then walk into a very posh restaurant and put on his bowtie while having an argument in another,’’ Ruffalo said. “I think Cam was somebody that didn’t really feel comfortable in that world, and it put a lot of pressure on him. I’d even go so far as to say that it was triggering to him in a lot of ways.’’
‘Infinitely Polar Bear’ hits theaters in Boston July 3.
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