If you’ve read our Avengers Assemble review, you’ll know we loved Mark Ruffalo’s nuanced and finely balanced portrayal of Bruce Banner / Hulk.
It truly is the best big screen outing for a character who has previously been reduced to a series of special effects shots, shorn of any real character or depth.
But while we’re excited about Ruffalo’s performance, he says initial fan reaction to his casting was less than positive: “I was overcome by a moment of fairly poor judgement early on by going online and seeing the response to me coming in.
“I won’t do that again, it wasn’t glowing and I found the fans exuberant passion to be very, very brutal. I hope we’ve amended that.”
The actor also revealed he was “a particular fan of the [Hulk] TV show” which chimed with the vision writer/director Joss Whedon had for the character.
“I talked to Joss about it, he said he wanted to return to the Bill Bixby world where he’s a man on the run but at the same time still tries to live his life, falling in love and having a sense of humour about himself. And I liked that.”
Ruffalo says he was also attracted to the film by “the idea that I’d be the first actor to play both Banner and the Hulk and that was probably the most exciting thing for me.”
“The one thing that we enjoy now is that technology has brought us to a place where an actor can play the Hulk. I loved Joss’s take on it but I also loved the idea of actually getting to bust out into a big green rage machine.”
Turning the actor into the Banner’s angrier side involved him “wearing a leotard that reduced me to a chinese chequers board” for the motion capture which he describes as “a very involved three part process.”
“We did all the motion capture before the movie, we did it while we were shooting the movie and then we did it after and it was a very intensive process but I was by myself most of the time which was lonely.”
Avengers Assemble on April 26th 2012