Mark Ruffalo revealed that his casting in the 2007 serial killer drama Zodiac didn’t go quite as some may think.
In a recent interview with High Snobiety, the actor said a studio rep made it clear that they didn’t particularly want him in the Paramount Pictures film.
“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,’” Ruffalo recalled.
In Zodiac, directed by David Fincher, two reporters, Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr., become obsessed with tracking down the Zodiac Killer, an unidentified murderer who went on a killing spree in San Francisco in the 1970s. Ruffalo portrayed Detective David Toschi in the movie.
But those comments didn’t deter the Oscar-nominated actor, especially since he later landed a role that he never could have imagined: Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“I was like… I had never done that. Studios, they weren’t coming to me in that way,” he said of his first call from Marvel. “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. I read it, and I was like, ‘I can do something with this.’”
Looking back, Ruffalo’s experience playing the legendary superhero in several MCU films was one that he’s “really grateful” for.
“It’s been a great ride,” the Poor Things actor said. “It’s given me a chance to do other things that I probably wouldn’t have a chance to do without that behind me.”
Earlier in the interview, Ruffalo also admitted that he was determined to break out of the rom-com box that he felt Hollywood execs put him in after his hit films 13 Going on 30 and Just Like Heaven early in his career.
“What I felt immediately in the film world is, once you did one thing well, that’s what they think you are,” he explained. “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.”
The Hollywood Reporter reached out to Paramount for comment.
