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?
MR: I think it was when I was a kid. I did a play when I was in high school. I dropped out of wrestling--I didn't do good wrestling my senior year and I joined the drama department and someone broke their arm and I was put into his part. And it was like the first night, and we did the play and I got some laughs and then I just thought, "This is what I want to do. This is amazing."
LD: That's just incredible.
MR: And it was kind of a lark, the whole thing.
LD: That's crazy!
MR: And then I went to my acting teacher. I said, "I'm not too old to be an actor, am I?" You know, like ballerinas [have to begin young]. So she said, "No, you're OK" [laughs]. Did having two parents that were actors help you in launching your own career?
LD: Well, that's actually why your answer is so interesting to me, because it was all around me.
MR: So it was like a fish in water, you didn't know the difference between acting and not acting.
LD: Yeah. I knew I had to do it at 9.
MR: Really?
LD: Oh, yeah. And I was obsessed.
MR: And was it from being on set? I mean, you have two of the great actors as parents.
LD: Yeah, they're great. And I watched the generation that made us all want to become actors, too, in the '70s.
MR: I know!
LD: When I was 7, I had loved horseback riding and I had been back and forth with my mom about getting really serious about riding and competing, and I went to spend my summer vacation with both parents. They were each working on movies--my dad was in California and my mom was in Arizona. My dad was working with Alfred Hitchcock on Family Plot, and my mom was working with Martin Scorsese on Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore--a very close title [to ours]. And at the end of the summer, I was like, "I've gotta be an actor." I told my mom. She said, "Well, you have to study for the next three years and you can't ride again, ever. You're giving it up, because you have to have one thing you're committed to." And I was watching Hitchcock and Scorsese direct actors, and all those sets were about: use what exists, try stuff, improvise, do whatever, don't worry about the script. It was all that energy. It was just [sighs] so great to watch. So, for me, there was no fluke. It wasn't dependent on wrestling not working out and someone breaking their arm. You wonder, if those things didn't happen, would you have ever become an actor? Was it all sort of weird kismet? It's so odd. I was acting professionally at age 11.
MR: Now, what was your first film part?
LD: First real professional job on my own?
MR: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains?
LD: No, Foxes.
MR: Oh, yeah. I love that movie. It's so cool.
LD: And I just turned 11. So I acted all the way through high school and I left high school six months early to go do a movie.
MR: Which one?
LD: Mask.
MR: Oh, right. God, you got all these great parts--are there any parts that you didn't get that you wish you had?
LD: Family Ties, the series.
MR: Really, you auditioned for that? Wow.
LD: And I would have spent 10 years doing a series.
MR: Were you dying to do that?
LD: I don't remember, but I just remember, I could have ended up on a sitcom for a decade.
MR: But did you want to do that?
LD: Not really, no.
MR: Was there something you wanted to do and you didn't get?
LD: Oh, a part I really wanted? Oh, yeah, tons.
MR: Which was it? What was the one?
LD: I screen-tested for Sixteen Candles--John Hughes--it was a big deal.
MR: Did you ever feel like you dodged a bullet?
LD: I got offered a very, very high-profile sort of Brat Pack, hockey, love story kind of movie. Big. Big salary, the girl lead--and the same week I got offered Mask, which was five scenes. I wanted to do Mask and my agents told me, "You're crazy," and they wouldn't work with me if I didn't do this other thing, and so I lost an agent.
MR: Oh, wow.
LD: And I made, whatever, scale on Mask and turned down this other thing and that was the greatest bullet I ever dodged. Just working with Peter Bogdanovich alone--
MR: It's such a great movie.
LD: But I never went through the process of working odd jobs and studying and bartending. What was that like?
MR: That sucked [both laugh]. All I wanted to do was acting.
LD: So you finished high school and went to New York to study?
MR: No, I came here [to Los Angeles] when I was 18. And Stella [Adler] was here half the year because she liked the sun. I was here and bartending, working, cleaning the toilets at the conservatory for my classes. I got on a student-work program. And I was taping Stella's classes, audiotaping them and then later videotaping them. So I'd sit in the booth and I watched all those classes for free, and they were packed, people standing. It was 99 seats and it was just packed. I'd never heard anybody talk about anything with that kind of respect and passion and belief, to hear her talking about acting like that, as the great art form. She used to say, "You're an actor, you're American aristocracy. You have a responsibility to lift yourself to this material and make yourself better."
LD: Isn't that beautiful?
MR: It was amazing as a young boy to hear that. And so that was carrying me through crappy jobs. I just wasn't very good, I don't think, early on, so I wasn't getting any parts. I was auditioning a lot. It wasn't because I wasn't getting the chances, I just didn't book anything. Three per year.
LD: I auditioned, I remember, for commercials all the time as a kid. I never got them. Never got any of it. But, for me, I feel blessed on one level that I had found and established my career by the time that I got out of high school that I missed that angst and just hell of working for a few dollars to get through school. But at the same time, I forfeited junior high and high school to work on movies, which is, you know--
MR: It's not easy work, either. That's a lot of pressure as a young person.
LD: It's not easy work. My parents were very against it, so there was a real conflict in my life with my family because they didn't want me to do it. So I was having to hide this other life, and that's heartbreaking in its own way, and I definitely missed a good portion of school life that would have been important for me, I think, on one level. And then when I'd come back--because I'd leave for three months to do a movie and then I'd come back and all the kids would hate me. "You think you're so cool because you just did a movie." Before you open your mouth, you're being, whatever--
MR: Taken down. You know what, everyone has that. No one escapes it.
LD: But then I got tons of work right away, and then there was a huge period of time where I didn't work.
MR: And that's horrible. Was that the darkest night?
LD: Yeah. I was in school for some time, and that helped, but you have to re-think it all. I always re-think it all. It is cyclical, and that's the gift of having parent actors. You know you're going to work constantly for three years and be very successful and appreciated for what you do, and then not appreciated and no work for two years. Those were the careers I watched growing up.
MR: So it doesn't scare you too much? Does it get to you when you're in the drought, so to speak?
LD: Yeah, it scares me less because I don't think it's about me; I think it's about the business. Because every single person I know has gone through that.
MR: Yeah, it's nice, it's nice to know that. And you directed a short film [1994's The Gift]?
LD: Yes, that's right.
MR: Did you like directing?
LD: I loved directing.
MR: Would you want to go back to it? Aren't you looking for something?
LD: Mm-hmm. We both are, right? You have a couple of things you want to direct.
MR: I have one thing that I know I want to do.
LD: Mark, you're such a good director. You directed me a lot in a very subtle and unobtrusive way.
MR: Now, c'mon, I did not direct you.
LD: You did, you did. No, let me say this: By being there for me, by always staying honest--without saying a word, you would intuit when we were on the right road, and that would help give me some guidance, too. It's a really good thing, because you've got your [director], which is everything as an actor, but you've also got your partner whose eyes you're looking into, and they're going to know if you're being truthful or not because you can feel it. And that was amazing. You'll make such a great director. I am terrified of theater, and I have told you that I want you to direct me in a play.
MR: You have to be in theater.
LD: But only if you direct me in a play, because I don't want to do it without you. [Ruffalo scoffs] I'm serious, you think I'm kidding.
MR: I'm going to do it. We're going to do something. Before it's all said and done, you will be on stage and I will be directing or acting with you.
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