POOR THINGS Star Mark Ruffalo on Sex Positivity & A Future Return to Hulk for GQ Hype Magazine

Pin

In a new GQ HYPE interview, Mark Ruffalo sits with GQ associate editor Olivia Pym to discuss sex positivity, playing the bad guy, his start to acting, and a potential return to his role as the Hulk.

Pin

On sex positivity and the prudishness of mass media

“The young people find [the sex scenes] shocking,” Ruffalo says. “It’s weird, it’s like this explosion of pornography in one sense and then this total move toward prudishness on the mass media side.”

Ruffalo tells GQ he sees Poor Things as reacting to the way that sex has been recently stymied in cinema, or else often reduced to being part of a trauma plot. “I mean, look at things like Euphoria. It’s the dark side of sex, which felt very regressive to me,” he says. “We’re very sex positive in my house but there’s the healthy version of that and then the traumatizing, more toxic version of it.”

On his first years as an actor: “My extended family saw what I was doing as an irresponsible lark”

When Ruffalo first got into acting work at 19, he was surrounded by people who were trying to make it—actors, painters, designers—and he felt like the people who weren’t struggling were lightweights. “My parents lost everything and couldn’t help me. My extended family saw what I was doing as an irresponsible lark. It forces you to be in the world in a way that you won’t be if you have money,” he tells GQ. “Money insulates you from the world. I had all of these varied experiences that I’m still drawing on today. I’d never give any of that up. You are so alive during that struggle.”

On a potential return to his role as the Hulk

Whether Ruffalo will return as Hulk is up in the air. “I’d love to do a standalone Hulk, I just don’t think that’s ever going to happen,” he says. The CGI for the character is costly to produce, even though Ruffalo tells GQ it’s likely to have come down in price over the years as technology has advanced. “It’s very expensive if you did a whole movie, which is why they use the Hulk so sparingly. I priced myself out!”

Ruffalo has heard what critics have to say about him giving his prime acting years to playing a comic book hero. “I’ve heard it a lot from my peers,” he says. “Sometimes I think it’s jealousy, a little bit. Because then I see them run off and do it.”

Read the full feature “Mark Ruffalo Wants to Be Bad, Too” by Gerrick Kennedy on GQ.com.

[Photo Credit: Tina Tyrell/GQ Magazine]

• GQ
• GQ Hype
• Magazines
• Mark Ruffalo
• Tina Tyrell