Mark Ruffalo hulked up for “Poor Things,” but in a very different way than Bruce Banner does in “The Avengers.”
The actor, who plays an outrageously sex-crazed lawyer obsessed with newly-resurrected Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) in the Yorgos Lanthimos film, told The Hollywood Reporter that his costumes entailed a lot of…accessories.
“I had ass pads. I had thigh pads, I had calf pads, I had a codpiece,” Ruffalo said. “I had a corset, I had the high collar. I had boots with a 3-inch heel on them.”
He added, of his character: “It makes him a bit of a rooster.”
Ruffalo recalled being hesitant on the role after first reading the “Poor Things” script, penned by Tony McNamara.
“I said to [Lanthimos], ‘I don’t think I’m right for this,’” Ruffalo said. “And he just laughed at me and he’s like, ‘It’s you.’”
Ruffalo said he adopted techniques from Charlie Chaplin, Richard E. Grant, Terry-Thomas, and even former MCU co-star Robert Downey Jr. for his performance. “And there’s just a lot of daydreaming,” he said of the heightened world of “Poor Things.”
Ruffalo previously told High Snobiety that the over-the-top salacious “Poor Things” role took him out of being typecast as a “depressed dad” or solely being regulated to rom-coms.
“I’m not playing the benevolent dad or the depressed dad or the fucked-up dad,” Ruffalo said.” I’m playing a bon vivant, a total egoist, and megalomaniac. I feel like it opened up the brackets on how people see me as a performer. And how I see myself.”
“I’m 55 now, and you start to think, ‘OK, I’m on the downside of this hill in a way, and there’s a limitation to how long it’s going to last and how long my body’s going to hold up.’ And honestly? I’m getting a little bored of myself as Mark Ruffalo,” he added. “I was trying to take the ship as close to the reef as I could possibly get without actually running aground. There’s a daringness in this that I normally wouldn’t have.”
“I was just like, ‘Fuck it, if I go down in a flaming disastrous performance, I don’t really give a shit.’ [But] I think that was the best time I’ve ever had on a movie,” Ruffalo continued. “To play that character, to do all the physical comedy, the language, and to make the arc that he made, it was so crazy and so exciting. It’s one foot on a banana peel and the other in a grave.”
And one codpiece in the trousers.
