Mark Ruffalo Will Be the First Actor To Be Bruce Banner AND The Hulk
This may not be ‘news;’ I was slightly out of the loop when a lot of The Avengers stuff started hitting, so I didn’t pay a ton of attention. But it’s news to me, and I think it’s pretty interesting. So suck it.
Anyway, Mark Ruffalo was talking to IGN about something (probably the DVD release of The Kids Are All Right, but why would anyone ask him about the stuff he’s promoting?) and they got him on the subject of playing Bruce Banner in The Avengers. The Ruff had some interesting insight, including revealing that he’ll be playing both the man and the monster, something no other actor has ever done.
I think you go right back to the beginning and dust off your first issue of Avengers and I’ve been doing that. I’ve been watching the 100 hours of Bill Bixby’s Hulk. And I’ve been really thinking about the inception, the original motivation of that character and why they came up with that character. He’s a cross between Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein. I’m finding a lot of stuff there. And I’m actually going to be physically playing the Hulk. No other actor’s ever done that. So I’ve been getting into Tai Chi and Pilates and doing a lot of movement stuff. I don’t know what I want to do with it exactly, but I’ve been working physically to bring the leviathan alive.
The big question that people who don’t follow international news have is ‘Will The Hulk talk in this film?’ Ruff doesn’t know, but he has some thoughts on that:
We ended the last Hulk with him smiling and you feel like he’s getting control of it. And I don’t know how deep we’re gonna get into that, but my general feeling is for Bruce Banner/the Hulk and what I hope we talk about is that Bruce Banner is slowly but surely — it’s like riding a wild mustang. At some point you do start to get it a little but under control. And like I said, I don’t know what the final script’s gonna be, but we’ve talked a lot about him at some point being able to penetrate his consciousness with the consciousness of the goliath.
People seem worried that Ruffalo doesn’t have what it takes to play the tortured Bruce Banner. It’s called acting, folks. It’s not like he’s being asked to play a black woman - as a human being, The Ruff certainly has experiences to draw on to play Banner.
