Mark Ruffalo recalls living in a ‘closet’ before stardom
Los Angeles: Hollywood star Mark Ruffalo went down memory lane and recalled his humble beginnings when he was waiting tables and had to travel everywhere by his budget motorbike that he would fix himself whenever it broke down.
“I couldn’t afford a car. I had a $250 1974 Honda XR250 that I could personally work on when it broke down that was the only way I could get around LA. I was living in a closet for $200. My whole nut was about $300 a month,” he said on the “SmartLess” podcast.
On the years it took him to get a foot in the door in Hollywood, he said: “It was a very slow progression. There’s really no reason that I should have tried as long as I did because that was from 18 to 28.”
Ruffalo was fired from the play that would have supposedly launched his career.
He recalled: “All I know is my big break was a play with Holly Hunter and Carole Caine and Bill Pullman. It was the hot thing in Los Angeles at the time. It was those people. Holly had already won the Academy Award and Carole was huge and Bill was huge. It was at the Met Theatre.”
“They started their own theatre, it was in the early 90s, and that was gonna be my big break, and I was of course fired four days before we opened. A stagehand fired me because Beth Henley was the director, but she just couldn’t bring herself to fire me. So I had a stagehand tell me that the producer was going to fire me.”
Asked why he was fired, he jokingly replied: “I sucked,” before he continued: “No, honestly, what I was told was that I was in a different play, which could possibly be the director’s fault.”
After winning huge applause in the 2000 film ‘You Can Count on Me’, Ruffalo went on to star in a series of rom-coms, including 2002’s ‘View From the Top’ alongside Gwyneth Paltrow.
He and Jennifer Garner then starred in 2004’s cult classic ’13 Going on 30′, the same year he was part of the cast of ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, which starred Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey.
Since 2012’s ‘The Avengers’, he has portrayed Dr. Bruce Banner/Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.