Mark Ruffalo is revealing that he felt like he had a target on his back for the Paramount Pictures serial killer drama “Zodiac.”
The 2007 David Fincher film follows two reporters, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo’s future MCU co-star Robert Downey Jr., as they try to track down the anonymous murderer who tormented San Francisco in the 1970s. Ruffalo portrays a police officer who is narrowing in on the case.
Almost 20 years later, and Ruffalo is now detailing how representatives for the “Zodiac” production were not interested in hiring him.
“Studios, they weren’t coming to me in that way,” Ruffalo told High Snobiety of his career at the time. “I’ll never forget when they were negotiating my deal [for ‘Zodiac’], the studio negotiator literally said to my manager, ‘Look, we don’t give a shit about Mark Ruffalo, we don’t even want Mark Ruffalo in this movie, so you’re going to take what we’re offering you or forget it.’”
A representative for Paramount
Ruffalo later joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the Hulk, an opportunity which he shared his gratitude for.
“So the fact that Joss Whedon came to me for the Hulk was so out of the blue. It’s a tough part – how do you get away with playing a character that doesn’t want to do what everybody wants him to do and sustain that? It’s like a trap,” Ruffalo said. “I read it and I was like, ‘I can do something with this.’”
The “Poor Things” actor admitted to feeling typecast by his rom-com stints prior to the MCU and “Zodiac,” saying, “What I felt immediately in the film world is, once you did one thing well, that’s what they think you are. They will just come to you with that part over and over again. And I was like, ‘No.’ My career is not going to be that. I’m going to do as much as I can to try and make people see me in different ways so that I can do more over the years.”
“Zodiac” director Fincher previously reflected on the making of the acclaimed true crime film, telling Empire magazine in 2020 that the time constraints of the film affected its storytelling.
“In trying to take something that probably would’ve been a pretty good five-hour movie and get it down to two hours and 45 minutes, we kind of made it too long on one hand and not deep enough on another,” Fincher said.
He also later recalled how actor Gyllenhaal was “very distracted” during production as upcoming film “Jarhead” was being released amid shooting “Zodiac.”
“When he’d show up for work, he was very scattered,” Fincher said of Gyllenhaal handling press. “His managers and his silly agents who were all coming to his trailer at lunch to talk to him about the cover of GQ and this and that. He was being nibbled to death by ducks, and not particularly smart ducks. They got in his vision, and it was hard for him to hit the fastball.”
He summed up, “I tell actors all the time: I’m not going to cut around your hangover, I’m not going to cut around your dog dying, I’m not going to cut around the fact that you just fired your agent or your agent just fired you. Once you get here, the only thing I care about is, did we tell the story?”
