Laura Dern and Mark Ruffalo: When Mark Met Laura

Mark Ruffalo and Laura Dern, who became fast friends on the set of their upcoming adultery drama We Don't Live Here Anymore, sit down for a candid conversation about marriage, passion, career -- and how Meg Ryan brought them together.

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SHE'S the Oscar-nominated star of such films as Blue Velvet, Jurassic Park, Citizen Ruth and Rambling Rose. He's the buzzed-about upstart who made a splash in the 2000 indie fave You Can Count on Me and was most recently seen romancing Jennifer Garner earlier this year in the frothy, well-reviewed 13 Going on 30.

She's a Hollywood legacy, the daughter of actors Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern (who divorced when she was 2), and was acting in films with the likes of Jodie Foster before finishing high school. He's the against-all-odds success story of a Wisconsin native who toiled for years in New York and Los Angeles, enduring hundreds of audition rejections before finally breaking out of the struggling-actor pack.

She's had high-profile romances with Jeff Goldblum, Billy Bob Thornton and director Renny Harlin; now she makes her home with musician boyfriend Ben Harper and their 2-year-old son, Ellery. He married his longtime sweetheart, Sunrise Coigney, a former actress, in 2000; the two have a 3-year-old son, Keen.

Dern and Ruffalo may come from strikingly different backgrounds, but a shared passion for risk-taking in acting bonded the two, who hadn't previously met, while filming the well-received Sundance adultery tale We Don't Live Here Anymore, which opens in August. In the emotionally wrenching drama--based on a pair of short stories by Andre Dubus, who also wrote the story In the Bedroom is adapted from--Dern and Ruffalo play Terry and Jack, a couple in crisis who become entangled in a love-affair quadrangle with their also-married best friends, played by Naomi Watts and Peter Krause. (Ruffalo and Watts were also producers on the film.) "As heavy as the movie is at times, we had a blast," says Ruffalo, Dern adds, "I haven't had that experience in my career but a couple times. It's very, very rare to work with someone that you feel is like a true partner." We invited the pair--now good friends--to kick back in the lush greenery of the Hollywood Hills and chat about what attracted them to the project--and to the profession that has such a hold on them.--Andre Chautard

MARK RUFFALO: Why did you want to do [We Don't Live Here Anymore] in the first place?

LAURA DERN: Because you were in it.

MR: [Blushes]

LD: [Laughs] But actually, that's true.

MR: Really?

LD: Yeah. It's not the only reason. But one of the reasons is because my very dear friend [Meg Ryan] had just worked with you in a movie [In the Cut] and said it was the most amazing experience she'd ever had as an actor, how much she loved working with you. So I thought, "Oh my God, I have to work with him."

MR: But you liked the character?

LD: Yeah, but I had never read the stories. I had just read the script, and I fell in love with Terry. I just loved the idea of playing someone who is beautifully flawed and human and in great conflict and hard to love and easy to love.

MR: What did you think her flaws were?

LD: You know, they're complicated. Obviously the part of her that's given up is sad to me. That, I think, is the part that encourages her to drink.

MR: What did she give up?

LD: I think she gave up believing in fulfilling her dreams and, even more tragic, I think she gave up on believing she could ever fulfill his, and that was so heartbreaking. She chose to be his partner over fulfilling her own creative path [as a writer], and when you give everything to your partner and then the partner's not happy, it's quite crushing.

MR: When we meet Jack, he's come to a point where he realizes that there's a limit to how far he can go. There's a great line, "I'm a reader, not a writer," and I think he tried to write for a long time and just realized that he didn't really have the talent. It was something that she kept alive in him all those years--her belief in him--and then to come and realize that you're a fraud, I think, is where he is.

LD: Well, why did you want to play Jack? I've never really asked you. Because I saw you every day struggling with being a man that you didn't want to have to be on some level, playing someone who's doing such heinous things. Yet I could tell you were so passionate about Jack. So what was it that made you fall in love with it and want to [executive] produce it and be that involved?

MR: Marriage is so complicated, and the way we see a lot of modern films about relationships is not really honest. Either it's really disrespectful or really simplistic, or idealized. And I think it's misleading to people, if we're going to use film as what it can be, to enlighten the human experience. [We Don't Live Here Anymore] is a really honest--and this is not to say that my relationship is like this--but it's an interesting look at young couples that got married early, had children early, and then find themselves at the point in their lives where they haven't realized what their greatest potential could be, and the sacrifice for children and the divisiveness that that can create in a relationship. And I just thought it was really honest, humorous, intimate--challenging to act, to do such morally questionable things, but still keep open the door of humanity to the guy. And all of us were struggling with it the whole time. I remember you were like, "God, how could she do this?" And John [Curran, the director], what was so great about him was he put your feet in the fire. We wanted to round out the edges of the characters and make them more likable, and he was always like, "No."

LD: I've personally done some heinous things in movies that I'm proud of [laughs], but this is the first movie that I've watched with an audience and actually felt really uncomfortable about a certain scene, where I was slightly embarrassed. Telling you to your face about sleeping with another man, that was hard for me to watch with other people. I know Naomi, she was so uncomfortable: "My God, women are going to hate me. I slept with my friend's husband." But we all had that. There's a beauty to the fact that each character has their own reprehensible behavior. Every day we'd come to work and have to have another fight [both laugh]. And it almost got hilarious, because it's just so fucking awful that every day was another battle.

MR: They're great fights, though.

LD: They're great fights!

MR: They're like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? fights.

LD: And they're great because they're redundant. They're fighting over the same crap for 10 years [both laugh]. It's so human.

MR: It is. It's very, very accessible, I think, to people who have been in relationships for a long time.

LD: And there's nothing pat about the movie, which I like.

MR: We don't know what's going to happen to them. I don't know. I'd like to think that they survive it.

LD: I do too. When did you know you had to become an actor? You never told me. As a kid, or later?

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