Mark Ruffalo made his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut as The Hulk in The Avengers back in 2012, but he's never had the chance to play Bruce Banner in a movie of his own. He did, however, get a leading role in Taika Waititi's Thor: Ragnarok, but most of his screentime is as the CGI Hulk.
You'd think that would mean Ruffalo could take it easy, but Waititi has confirmed to Variety that the actor insisted he do all of the motion-capture work for The Hulk's scenes!
"He has very strong opinions about what Hulk would say and how he would say it," the filmmaker revealed. "People assume, ‘Oh, well it’s a CGI character. Why would an actor do the movements?’ But he insisted on doing all the work in motion capture. All of that stuff is him, dressed in those ridiculous pajamas that you have to wear with ping-pong balls on his head."
"He wanted to show that Hulk was driving the vehicle and Banner was left in the trunk," he added.
Ruffalo is quite clearly an actor who cares a lot about the character he plays, and it pretty shocking to think he still wanted to play The Hulk when it would have been easy to let Waititi take charge of those scenes with a stuntman (and then record his lines with ADR somewhere down the line).
Instead, he was there playing The Hulk AND Bruce Banner, and that's unexpected, yet undeniably awesome.
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