Mark Ruffalo Quotes

Acting's all about stepping out of the box, so I don't want to go to work every day and play Cassie Scerbo at all.

I love playing characters, so I'm always telling my agents, 'Don't worry if the character description is something you think I'm not. Let me try to be that person.'

You want to play another kind of character in another genre, and it's been something I've been trying to do if I can in the career so far, and it's something I hope to continue because it's interesting to me and you get to do different things as an actor.

And I thought, you know, I have to say that maybe the whacked out mother is my new favorite role, but I don't want to just do it and become Nurse Ratchett.

I always get offered the pretty, popular girl roles, but I want to do something dark, really challenge myself and get out of my comfort level.

I'm not looking to do 'Half Nelson' next, but to play anything that's a little more complex is really fun.

Normally, I rely heavily on my director to massage me out of my actor comfort zones.

People ask me, 'Are you worried you're going to be typecast as a John Locke type of guy?' I say he's the perfect guy to be typecast as! He's vulnerable and ambitious and sort of unstable. It was a good actor's role.

The strange thing about being an actor is it's almost a little dangerous to invest in an idea. I think once you invest in the idea of where someone is going, then you're not fully open to being able to play the opposite of that if that's what the character is going to do.

My biggest goal is to keep playing characters that challenge me.

I don't have the body or the face for romantic comedies, so I've never been offered those. The challenge is that a lot of people see you only as your last character, so you're constantly competing with whatever your last movie was.

Being a dramatic character was more difficult for me. It was a new thing that I explored because it was challenging. But I love to challenge myself and different things.

Ninety percent of my roles, I've had to fight for. It's only a really small percentage of people who get handed roles. But that can be quite scary. The good thing about auditioning is that you get to test yourself and see if you can play this character - you're also auditioning yourself. I enjoy seeing what the chemistry is between the people you might be working with.

I let the comedy come through the character and just try to make sure that everything is kind of rounded in a truth, in a reality, because that's what I need to make a character work.

I have always wanted to play different kinds of stuff, but it's hard, first to find good material, and then to change people's perception of you so they'll let you do it. I mean, I would really like to play a poet, but once they get this notion of you as a street guy, it's hard to change that.

There comes a point when you've exhausted your opportunities playing good guys. I've been around long enough, I think I'm entitled to explore a bit. But what I saw there was an opportunity to play a character different from what the audience's expectation was. A chance to take their crude experience of me - of my iconography, if you will - and turn it on its ear at an appropriate juncture in the film to be useful to the process of telling the story.

I turn 30 next month, and in my 20s, I've been in this limbo of being too old to play the young lead, and too young to play the 30, 35 - year - old. I've always had an older head on my shoulders because I've hung out with older people. I was in television shows with older actors, and when I was 15, 16, 17, I sat up in hotel lobby bars with older actors until the early hours of the morning hearing them tell stories. I've always been drawn to older characters and I've always struggled to get into the younger roles. It feels good to be finally getting to an age where I'm playing my age.

People watch me when I get into these characters that I have in my head, so perhaps I should try acting. So I did.

It's easy to get stagnate, if you play the same character. In New Moon, I felt like I was going a little bit deeper.

I just try to play more and more difficult roles.

Of course, every actor has their box and you have to respect and play for it, but I do love challenging myself. I love every role to be new, and I always like to bring a freshness to every character I play.

Each character has their own challenges. The challenge to doing one scene is your whole history of who you are and your relationships, you only have this one shot.

The characters I have the least in common with are the ones I have the greatest success with. The further a role is from my own experience, the more I try to deepen it.

There's a tacit agreement between myself and the audience that I will entertain them when they buy their ticket, and I've been the one that has screwed that up. Once in while I indulge myself and try something else, and I keep my fingers crossed that it will come out good and there'll be enough people who will enjoy it, but that doesn't often happen.

With The Help, I knew folks involved in the project peripherally. I wanted to audition for Hilly Holbrook and part of the initial feedback was: "No, Bryce is too nice." That's part of the reason why I really love auditions as well - you get to try out a character and try out different versions of a character.