Mark Ruffalo's Activism Wades into 'Dark Waters'

You thought Mark Ruffalo got angry as the Incredible Hulk? Wait until you see him in Dark Waters (Nov. 22), a movie he stars in and produced. He plays Robert Bilott, a real-life lawyer who attributed health catastrophes in low-income Midwestern communities to chemical dumping. Ruffalo tells AARP about a story that he finds “stranger than fiction.”

What kind of movie ‘Dark Waters’ is

I had no idea about this story, this huge cover-up that spans decades. We come to find over and over again that government is actually beholden to a corporate system, and we're being harmed. I saw this as a great environmental film, a horror flick and a whistleblower story. It had all the elements I love.

Why Bilott's health-crisis scenes made Ruffalo flash back to his own benign brain-tumor battle

You can't help it. I was in an MRI like that so many times. I did have my wife lying next to me as I slept, wondering what the future was going to be. Of all these really difficult things you go through in life, if you can put it into art in some way, then they have meaning. They're elevated from the banal and mundane — you take the bad luck of life and make it into something meaningful.

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Ruffalo’s Résumé

Age: 52 on Nov. 22

Hometown: Kenosha, Wisconsin

Top box-office hit: The Avengers

Top critical hits: Spotlight, You Can Count on Me, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Total ticket sales: $10.5 billion

Oscar nominations: Spotlight, Foxcatcher, The Kids Are All Right

Top TV shows: The Normal Heart (Emmy nomination), I Know This Much Is True (coming in 2020)

Family: Wife Sunrise Coigney, 3 children

“The extra burden of a partner having to take care of the house and kids when you’re crusading, that is something I’ve had to struggle with over the years.”

Why he does movies like ‘Dark Waters’ and the pedophile-priest exposé ‘Spotlight'

I come from the tradition of the Group Theatre. Stella Adler was my teacher. Part of the Group's ethos was that theater could inform the public.

Why ‘Dark Waters’ costar Tim Robbins is his activist-actor role model

We both came up in the L.A. theater scene. He was an inspiration. He's always been outspoken, and even though he's been maligned viciously, he's never been wrong.

Saved by Anne Hathaway, who plays Mrs. Bilott

I was having a crisis of confidence until the moment we started shooting. Anne asked what was the matter. I said, “I don't think I can do this.” She was like, “What are you talking about? You've been doing this for years, you developed this movie. Nobody knows this better than you. And don't you think Robert felt this way at times, too?” She gave me this pep talk, and I realized lying in bed in my hotel that night that she was right. And in that moment, in that vulnerability, we became a couple [onscreen].