“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a river.”

—Title of Episode 6, Task, 2025.

“What’s he like?”

“He’s okay. Nice. ‘Not hard on the eyes’ as my mother would say.”

Shutter Island, dir. Martin Scorsese, 2010.

When there’s something in the water, trust: Mark Ruffalo is going to find out what it is.

An actor, activist, and relentlessly questing artist, Ruffalo’s personal convictions are present in everything he takes on, from plays to protests. The huge range of characters he’s chosen to portray over a three-decade- long-career all share one thing in common: No matter the material or genre, Ruffalo emanates a sincere, vulnerable appeal that instantly draws you in to whatever he might be doing on-screen, whether comic or tragic, heroic or unhinged.

Early headshots of Ruffalo show a tousle-haired, bushy-browed hunk, his intense dark eyes staring right into your soul. Now 57, he’s still that guy, his youthful fire now tempered with experience, maturity and some battle scars. Happily married (to Sunrise Ruffalo) with three kids (Keen, Bella, Odette), to new generations of fans, he’s a dad for all seasons. Often a cop, very rarely a villain, he can do it all.

Several “based upon a true story” assignments have seen him play real people—his performance as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Rezendes in Spotlight, which won Best Picture at the 2016 Academy Awards, was acclaimed by critics. Golden Globe, Emmy, and SAG Best Actor Awards came Ruffalo’s way in recognition of his dual role as twin brothers in I Know This Much Is True in 2020. From art film to blockbuster, the world’s top auteur directors line up to book him: Spike Jonze to Todd Haynes, Michael Mann to Martin Scorsese, David Fincher to Fernando Meirelles, Bong Joon-ho to Michel Gondry, Ang Lee to Jane Campion. You can visit his star on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard, steps from where Ruffalo trained at the Stella Adler Academy. And on top of all that, he’s got a plum position in the Marvel Cinematic Universe Avengers franchise, bringing angry green giant Hulk and nuclear scientist Bruce Banner to the big screen. He also gives a ready hand to support the storytelling of other filmmakers, with Executive Producer credits on powerful documentaries Lakota Nation vs the United States, (2022) and Invisible Hand (2020).

Ruffalo’s now taken on a formidable lead role in new limited series Task, debuting this September. The gritty, Philadelphia-set realist drama delves into an active case seen through the eyes of FBI agent Tom Brandis, and also through those of the criminal he’s pursuing, struggling local father Robbie (Tom Pelphrey). The “Task” is the inexperienced Task Force comprised of State Trooper Lizzie Stover (Alison Oliver), Chester PA Police Officer Aleah Clinton (Thuso Mbedu), and County Detective Anthony Grasso (Fabien Frankel) whom Brandis has to work with to solve the case. Martha Plimpton is the self-described “tough bitch” superior agent on the brink of retirement who tries to keep them on course despite fractures from the inside, while Brandis tries not to let his personal issues overwhelm him.

It’s riveting. So let’s get wet.

Last week I dove into all of the seven episodes of Task, back to back. It was extremely intense. Drugs, murder, gangs, poverty, tragedy. But also hope. So tell me something about inhabiting the character, FBI field agent Tom Brandis, and all that he goes through, over such a long time?
It was really intense. It was a seven month shoot. Tom is such a troubled soul, and he’s dealing with so much. So it was a lot to carry around, to have the extra weight on, physically, and to just be living in his world. And the whole world surrounding the motivations for the crimes, where you’ve got people struggling to make their lives work in really terrible circumstances. I have a friend who’s done some time in prison. He said to me, “Mark, there are no excuses, but there’s always reasons.” I like how the show really captures that. How people get trapped in a certain life, into a certain class, a certain upbringing, a certain education. How, as their opportunities become more and more limited, they become trapped in a life that they never set out to be living. I feel like Tom is in that situation, caught up in so many predicaments, and they’re these unsolvable things that are mostly outside of our control. He’s dealing with alcoholism, he’s dealing with his wife being murdered…He’s dealing with trying to track down the murderers, and a kid who’s been kidnapped. It’s a lot. 

That’s true, but it’s really handled very sensitively, showing the inner workings of the different socioeconomic groups, and how your impromptu Task Force is the intersection between law and order and the underground economies operating in the same region. I actually didn’t realize Philadelphia was so rural or so wild, or that landscapes like that even existed there, because what you see on TV always is this very dark urban city.
We’re just outside of Philly, which is very pretty. It’s called “Delco,” Delaware County, the same universe that also bred Mare of Easttown. It’s only 20 minutes from the city and you’re already in these rural areas that are in a way divorced from the higher urban levels of crime. But there’s also a drugs scene and related crime there in these parts of Philly too. That’s very real there.

You play an FBI agent, but not quite like Agent Dale Cooper or Mulder and Scully—you’re not playing the sort of flashy FBI guy that we are used to on screen. Tom is a down-to-earth type of person. He’s out in the field, in the mud, not wearing a black suit. You’ve been so many versions of “law enforcement officer” over the years—this is a new variant.
It’s so funny, it keeps coming back to me. I would say Tom is a “working class” cop in so many ways. And the fact that he is a lapsed Catholic, who had also been a priest, that was one of the big selling points for me. That he wasn’t flashy and that he was sort of burned out…but he has a real sense of empathy and compassion from his own loss which is just grand and all encompassing. I worked with ex-FBI agent Scott Duffey, who was our technical advisor, and there are a lot of guys who approach their work much like Tom does. It’s a much softer touch. One thing we always talked about was having that understanding of humanity. I was learning having empathy was just a really powerful quality for an FBI agent to have, because then people feel safe to open up to you. They do a lot of interviewing, of both criminals and victims. So much of that work is piecing together very subtle cues. He’s just a very good cop in that way, and he’s not what you would consider to be your cliché version of an FBI agent.

I also noticed this metaphor of the water and the river—it runs through the show. Maeve (Emilia Jones) teaching Sam (Ben Lewis Doherty) how to swim. The brothers diving in all weathers. The last scene with Eryn (Margarita Levieva). I found that with Tom Pelphrey’s character, that the water offered him escape and cleansing, the ultimate resolution to his problems.
‍Also with my character Tom Brandis, washing his face in the ice bath in the morning. The water theme, was really intricately done… There’s a lot of that duplicating happening in there, and two fathers who are trying to save their families and how primal that is. It’s about family. It’s about loss, it’s about longing, it’s about home. You know, “What is our home? How do we get home? How do we keep a home?”

It’s also about revenge and different ways of approaching it. Revenge is really the motivation for this entire crime spree, that becomes apparent, and your character’s tempted to be more vengeful. He instead redirects that impulse into love. It’s emotionally intense, it’s beautifully shot. Which seems to be your specialty for HBO’s limited series’ at the moment.
Yeah, I’ve done a couple for  HBO. When Brad [Ingelsby, Task show runner, writer, producer] and Jeremiah [Zagar, director] said, “We want Mark for this,” HBO was like, “We’ll never get him. We broke him with I Know This Much Is True.” But they got me. They had me at “Hello.” I mean, it’s such a beautiful script and there’s just so much grace in it, at a time when it feels like there’s just so little grace around us. That was ultimately what really drew me to Task.

Inhabiting these psychological states for so many months, does that drain you?
I really love acting, and the fact that these kinds of roles are really challenging, especially when they’re a protracted immersion over seven months or six months of time. I choose them because they mean something to me. Because they have a message that means something to me, that ultimately I feel like is a positive message, even though it might be difficult to receive. There were people, people that I know and love, who said to me, “I just can’t take watching I Know This Much Is True during the pandemic. I just can’t do it.” You know, like that. But hey. The challenge with these roles, with these narratives, is always exciting to me, and in a weird way, uplifting to me. I like to do comedy too, you know, but those roles don’t always affect people the same way.

Your body of work includes several films where you put yourself on the line, for example addressing Congress in 2019 about the environmental poisoning raised in Dark Waters (Todd Haynes, 2019). [Ruffalo’s full speech should be read by every American.] Many other of your projects, and that would include Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015), also confront major problems in our society. If you don’t mind talking a bit about selecting those kinds of projects?
I think a lot of it was born from the kind of training I had as an actor. I studied with Stella Adler, and she came out of the Yiddish Theater, which became the Group Theater. They did Waiting for Lefty, (Clifford Odets, 1935) which kicked off the Union movement in the United States and was responsible for so much change. When you come up in the theater, which I did, so many of the plays are about ideas, they’re about big ideas. Either they’re directly challenging systemic issues, or mostly, they’re concerned with the deathless issues of human failings, of human strife, human struggle. A lot of those big ideas have to do with justice and righteousness and/or the incompatibility of a dialectical nature of the truth. The dramatic situation is where two truths exist at the same time and are incompatible with each other. That is what Stella Adler would say was the premise—the basis—of modern theater.

Coming up that way, I always felt the power of storytelling directly connecting with an audience. That you could—I knew you could—touch people and inform the way they viewed the world. Transmit to them a deeper understanding of what it was to be human. Stella would say, “People should have to pay to go to church, and the theater should be free,” because that’s where you really learn to be a human being. That was the tradition that I came from. I got into activism basically through that, because her message to us was: you have to know the times you are living in. You have to be politically savvy and to be an artist you have to speak for all the people who don’t have a voice as an artist. To Stella, those were your responsibilities as an artist. That type of thinking really moved me, gave acting meaning to me. So my approach to acting was outside of a trend for navel-gazing or becoming very self-referential, doing it purely to build your ego or your brand, all those things. It’s kept me safe, in a strange way.

What would you say to yourself when you’d just arrived in LA when you were struggling as an actor—your young self who’s like, “How am I gonna make it in this crazy business?”
Just keep doing what you’re doing, man.

Well, he did it right. By now you’ve worked with every single auteur of the 20th and 21st centuries."
There’s plenty that I haven’t worked with, but yeah, I’ve been so blessed. I’m always surprised that I’m still going, you know? I’m gonna work with Bertrand Bonello (The Beast, Nocturama, Saint Laurent) soon, which is exciting.

Was it a mind-fuck to go from being a kid watching the classic The Incredible Hulk series on TV growing up in the late 70s, 80s, to actually becoming Dr. Bruce Banner and his super-sized alter-ego?

Absolutely. That show was so moving to me. And to get that role—I was just surprised, honestly. First of all, I was so shocked that they would come to me for that. Because, at that point I wasn’t really a studio darling. Whenever I did a studio movie, it was because a director forced them to take me. They didn’t wanna take me. And they were quite frank about that. Like, when we were trying to work the deal, they’re like, “Listen, this is it. We don’t really care if you’re in this or not. We’re not negotiating with you. This is take it or leave it.” At first, I thought, ‘maybe I can’t do this. Maybe I don’t belong here.’ But I was also just absolutely thrilled when it came through.

Now let’s talk about Poor Things, (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023) which of course, shocked and moved audiences, and is such an incredible work of art on so many levels. This was one of the most intense stories ever brought to the Oscars. (In 2024, the film won four, including one for Emma Stone as Best Actress, with Ruffalo nominated for Best Supporting Actor.)
That was a very special moment, that I would only hope to ever have that happen again. Where it’s just an amazing piece of material with one of the best directors, and the best actors and actresses. And the writing was so delicious. Duncan was a character that was just completely unbound, [laughs]…completely free. Outrageously free in so many different ways.

Duncan Wedderburn. An absolute uninhibited lunatic, a figure that drew Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter on…quite the adventure. Being Duncan all day, and then going home to your family, was there a clash there. Did you start becoming more histrionic?
‍My wife was like, “Who has the cat dragged in now?” [Laughs]. I was actually in Budapest for a long while—we were there for months shooting, and so it was hard to get back and forth. So I was there a lot, and I was so totally involved in that world. There is always what my wife Sunrise calls “a re-entry.” I didn’t notice it. But she’s like, “You walk different. You talk different,” you know? It’s like living with some other person, which can be fun sometimes, but also really annoying. 

How does Lanthimos direct actors? Is he hands-on, controlling, or does he just let you take it where you wanna go?

We did three weeks of rehearsal and we barely touched the script. We never talked about the character. We just basically did theater games and if we would ever involve a script, it was just in play. It was never really taken seriously. All along the way, Yorgos was giving you hints. So he was showing me, say, a video of a performance by Pina Bausch, or the Peeping Tom Belgian dance company. Or suggesting to “watch this film,” so I would watch Belle de Jour, [Luis Buñuel, 1967] or listen to a piece of music. The approach was never direct. And it really was never “intellectual” the way he would suggest to engage with the works, it was mostly “sensual.” He hates the intellect. He shies away from heavy discussions about character or story. But what he does do is he lets you explore it physically. I think that that’s why that performance is so unique, compared to anything I’d ever done, because I’ve never had a film director actually create the space or even understand how to approach a piece of material like this. From that oblique but also all-encompassing point of view, which is very typical of a theater director. And at that, of an experimental theater director, which he is. That’s what he came up from. It was very special. It was within a world that I immediately understood and could be very free within. So I was able to use that rehearsal process in the most effective and efficient way for myself.

And then of course, the response to the film—it was a big, massive across-the-world film.

It took me around the world. It’s just such a stirring film about independence, about freedom, about female independence too. I mean, what our independence or, the world’s independence is hinging on right now, is female independence. 

Give us some insight on Shutter Island and working with another auteur, the great Martin Scorsese. 

The thing about all these directors is they all have their own world. They all take you on a journey that is different from each other, you know? And Scorsese’s was based on an immersion in cinema. We all watched a bunch of movies that he had curated for us, then we would discuss them. The films were of the period, or they were in some way related to the film. So we watched Titicut Follies, [Frederick Wiseman, 1967] which is one of the best documentaries about mental illness and mental health institutions. It’s real, horrible, cruel, mad. It’s an incredible film.  We watched Out of the Past [Jacques Tourneur, 1947], and that’s kind of where my character came from, he’s based on the Robert Mitchum character there. 

It’s like basically doing intensive Film Studies courses when you work with Scorsese—afterwards, you’ll have done a film PhD. 
Absolutely. And that becomes a language that he uses to communicate part of his direction. He’s inviting you to pick up on cues that are hidden in there, that he’s laying down showing you those films. There’s a specific reason that he is showing you those films. And his visual storytelling—he’s a maestro, this is visual storytelling at the highest level. Watching him work, I was there for it all, in the end, I had worked only one less day than Leo. I was there every single day. It was just incredible. And their relationship…Again, I’m like, “How did I end up here?”

The theme of this milestone 200th issue of Flaunt has to do with finding and “embracing your joy.” And so I think even though you play quite harrowing roles often, you’re still finding joy in nailing that.
‍So much. I mean, there has to be joy, and for acting to be loose and mercurial, it has to be playful, even the heaviest shit. Even with Task, we are laughing our heads off. What I’m always looking for is the humor present there. I was always like, “Ok where are the laughs?” Stella Adler used to say, “You gotta get their mouths open long enough (through laughter) to shove the medicine down.” But it should never be a straight line. You should always have one foot on a banana peel, and the other in the grave, and vice versa. So I’m always looking for the laugh because the laugh is the inflection point of humanity. When you’re there in the theatre, you can hear the silence. You can sense the silence—but a laugh informs you’ve become a community. 

That’s why the movie theater is such a sociological phenomenon of the 20th Century, a place that brought everyone together, despite the horrors of the world around them. So what would be some of your more fun, more comic roles that you’ve been able to get those laughs?
‍There’s a little movie, Infinitely Polar Bear. It’s my kids’ favorite movie of mine. Not many people have seen it. I think it’s so funny. It’s about a bipolar father raising his two mixed race daughters by himself, in the 70s. It’s just really beautiful and funny and touching and there’s just a lot of comedy in it. 

When you directed your debut feature, Sympathy for Delicious, [2010] you had a great response. I’m just guessing that you’ve been too booked and busy to direct again?
It’s funny because I actually “quit acting” after I directed it. I was like, “I’m done acting. I’m just gonna do this.” Like, “This is all, this is everything. This is the ultimate culmination of acting and directing.” It felt like just the most creative position I could be in. Working with all these other artists, inviting them to bring their best selves, and most creative selves, to that experience. Thoughts like this. 

So I was at Sundance, and I’d already quit acting. The Kids Are Alright [Lisa Cholodenko, 2010] was gonna be my last acting job. But then Sympathy for Delicious and The Kids Are Alright both premiered at Sundance at the same time. I was sitting in the audience for The Kids Are Alright, which was an “issue” film too, about gay marriage. It wasn’t a polemic, it was the story of how gay marriages are just like straight marriages in every single way, you know? I was sitting there, and I was like, “Wow, okay. That’s what I love about acting. That is what that is.” And it was around that point that all this work started coming in, and I haven’t directed again just because I’ve been working all the time.

I think you’d be the best teacher or professor to have. 
You know, I was either gonna be a teacher or direct and be an actor. Those were my two dreams. 

You’re managing to do both, I think. 
Thank you. I’d love to do that. I’ve actually done substitute teaching for the Stella Adler Academy in LA for years. I’m on the board there. I would love to end up teaching when things calm down a little bit. 

Back to Task, I noticed your son Keen Ruffalo has a small role as well: Trip, who gets kicked out of the house. 
Yes. That was really his first big role. It was great. He’s now shooting a TV show with Megan Park right now for Netflix. He’s got a great role, one of the leads. [Connor in Sterling Point]. He’s out there for four months shooting eight episodes.

Do you feel like when you discover something obscure on a series or movie set somewhere, that it adds into your subsequent arsenal of tools?

Yes, it does all seem to feather in. It’s like one thing informs another thing, informs another thing, or informs my personal movement. Or my personal growth takes me into an area that maybe I had never been before. Or, somebody sees me in something. Like Bong Joon-ho saw me in Poor Things. And he’s like, “Oh, this guy can do this. That’s part of him.” For me, it’s been like, you start out, you do something good, and then people think that’s all you have. Your greatest successes become their own sort of prisons. Unless you challenge them and you challenge people’s thinking of you. And so as an actor, you’re trying to throw your elbows out, and make the brackets large enough to hold, all of you which is constantly growing, you hope. To be constantly evolving and constantly taking in more deeply the human experience, and that means every dimension of that, from perverted to sublime.

Words that are extremely apropos to Mickey 17 (Bong Joon-ho, 2025). Your interpretation of Kenneth Marshall, the absolutely nuts leader of the expedition to build the new world colony is indelible in its courage. You do not hold back; he’s odious, arrogant, corrupt on a cellular level. That’s truly how the future will be—humans making mistakes and fucking up. 

Yes, they do “fuck up.” It’s fucking disastrous. The past few years I’ve gotten some opportunities to sort of go off the beaten path for whatever people tend to see me, you know? It started with Poor Things, which then led to Mickey 17.

Due to pollution and our deliberate destruction of Planet Earth, the Mickey 17 spaceflight colonization scenario might come to pass very soon. This brings us to another of the issues you’ve confronted head-on. I don’t think any other actor has made two films about crimes of the DuPont corporation: Dark Waters, where you play the real-life lawyer Rob Bilott, and Foxcatcher, (Bennett Miller, 2014) where you play David Schultz, the Olympic wrestler lured in, exploited and eventually murdered by John du Pont (Steve Carell). Two very different films, and very different roles for you. But both about the filthy lucre derived from the unchecked industrial chemical production which results in the poisoning of land, water, animals, and people.
I mean, I can tell you…I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you know it’s just coming out now that 3M and DuPont knew that plastics could not be recycled starting in the 70s, and they’ve fucking been lying to us the whole way through. All this time. 

As you explained in your movie, all of these chemicals are post-war industrial poisons derived from the likes of the Manhattan Project…There’s no getting around the fact that the 20th century was the most exciting era culturally, the century of so much “progress,” but also the most damage that we could possibly, possibly do to the planet.
Those companies are all fucking just pure evil. I don’t know anything they’ve done that hasn’t in some way been connected to the most evil things that have been perpetrated on this planet. 

All that the DuPont corporate money, of course, ended up in the absolutely toxic Foxcatcher situation. 
They chose to poison the world for profit—and we see it again and again. Exxon knew in the ’70s their product would melt ice caps, heat the planet, and unleash catastrophic weather. They knew it would kill millions through pollution. And now we’ve learned the same companies knew 90% of plastics could never be recycled, yet sold us that lie to keep making money. At every turn, it’s been deceit for profit—and that mindset has brought us to this dangerous point. The same story we saw with big tobacco, the Sacklers, and the opioid crisis and god knows what else. 

And with that, how does one be an activist and remain employed in Hollywood?
Listen, in my heart of hearts I feel deeply committed to people. I believe there should be justice in the world. I don’t know if I’m right, but at the end of the day, I’m coming from my heart. I think ultimately that resonates with people, whether they agree with me or not. I’m not trying to hurt anybody. I might be wrong. I don’t know. I’m always coming from a place of compassion, or I try to. A place of thoughtfulness, helping to give voice to people who don’t normally have their voices heard. To really see that through. But I think the filmmakers, the other artists, really get it, you know? A lot of people are too scared to speak up. But I’ve been doing it for so long now that it’s just—I don’t know any other way to operate. I wouldn’t be “me” if I did that, if I ever stopped.

Well I’m glad there’s a Mark Ruffalo to stand up, to push these issues into compelling feature films. To get these facts on the record. So that no matter what happens in the future, if we’re censored or otherwise muted, if they try to get us to “shut up,” that your movies and statements will remain.
‍Thank you. To me, films are incredibly powerful ways to communicate really difficult truths, you know? And so that’s why I’ve wanna take the activism more into just storytelling. It transcends all the polemics, it transcends the divides that we’re all fighting, that are being reinforced every single day. Because storytelling, for some reason, just does that. Films can transcend those polemics, entrenched ideas of identity that people hold onto. That’s what is really interesting to me.

***

I know he’s speaking from the heart. And so I let Mark Ruffalo, American dad, teacher, mentor, and advocate get back to his East Coast evening. Check out Task to enjoy his sincerity—and beguiling charm—in action. He’s the rare actor that hasn’t allowed his innate moral fiber to be burned off by incandescent movie-star success. He’s there at the protest or picket line, he’s open-eyed about the money-and-power-fueled corruption present in all systems today, but he can still see joy in the world around him. Enjoy the feel of cold water on his skin as he takes a dive headlong into that icy lake. That inbuilt super-hero duality is perhaps the key to Ruffalo. Because whether calm and collected, or super-sized and angry, he’s all hero, on both sides. 

Photographed by Derek Cianfrance

Styled by Chloe Cussen

Written by Hannah Bhuiya

Production Assistant: Cody Cianfrance