Count on Him to Step Back

So here’s Mark Ruffalo, fresh from his star-making turn as a moody slacker in the hit film “You Can Count on Me,” winner of the best actor award at the Montreal Film Festival, young, gifted, ambitious and hot, hot, hot.

What’s his next big career move? Make a boffo Hollywood action pic? Go on Letterman to tout the six feature films he’s working on with brand-name commodities like John Woo, Nicolas Cage, Robert Redford and Gwyneth Paltrow?

Or, um, take time off from his skyrocketing film career to direct a play by a little-known writer about the aftershocks of a young girl’s suicide on a ‘60s suburban community. At a 99-seat theater. On an iffy stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard. For no money.

And they wonder why Hollywood agents get ulcers.

Actually, this gig directing his friend Tim McNeil’s play “Margaret” at the Hudson Backstage Theatre isn’t some eccentric reverse-career move. Ruffalo regards it as a homecoming, an attempt to reconnect with a place many Hollywood insiders consider the worst possible training ground for any young actor intent on making the cover of Vanity Fair: L.A.’s prodigious but often underappreciated 99-seat theater community.

“You say you’re a New York theater actor and they put you to the front of the line. You say you did theater in Los Angeles and they think you’re an amateur,” Ruffalo says, managing a smile between bites of a soy-protein bar, his breakfast one recent morning before rehearsal at the Hudson.

Yet without L.A.’s small theater scene, Ruffalo swears, he couldn’t have made the great leap forward into TV (the New York cop drama “The Beat”) and celluloid (“Committed,” “Ride With the Devil,” “Studio 54”). And without it today, he might be going slightly bonkers.

“I wanted to put the brakes on a little bit,” says the actor, who’s splitting his time between the Hudson and rural Valencia, where Woo is shooting the $120-million World War II drama “Windtalkers,” starring Cage and Christian Slater. Ruffalo plays a Greek American soldier assigned to protect two Navajo Indians, whose native tongue was used by the U.S. Army as a code to foil Japanese eavesdroppers.

“It’s pretty heady stuff, everything that’s happening for me right now,” he continues, “and I know at the bottom of it, it’s all because of my theater training, it’s all because of the years I put into doing plays. It’s probably been about six months since my last play, so I wanted to get my theater muscle back into working order. It keeps me humble.”

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Humility was probably Ruffalo’s best available option until three years ago, when he stunned the New York theater world with his performance in Kenneth Lonergan’s acerbic off-Broadway comedy “This Is Our Youth.” Playing a scruffy Upper West Side ne’er-do-well who rips off his father and gets caught up in a drug deal, Ruffalo put some reviewers in mind of a young Marlon Brando. His fumblingly articulate character, a slouchy, rebellious boy-man who actually totes around a bag of toys, conveyed a kind of suppressed sweetness along with a profound alienation camouflaged by humor.

“Mr. Ruffalo delivers the kind of masterly comic performance that rekindles your awe at the persuasive power of fine acting,” critic Peter Marks wrote in the New York Times. “You get the outward manner of a young man trapped between his sensitive and destructive impulses, an uncertain grown-up only half willing to abandon childhood.”

Playwright Lonergan says he knew he’d found the right actor for the job after auditioning Ruffalo several years ago for a one-act version of “This Is Our Youth,” titled “Betrayed by Everyone,” that premiered at the Met Theatre in Los Angeles.

“He’s very peculiar and very appealing,” Lonergan says, “and the character as written had a very arrhythmic personality, but very intelligent, the sort of person who is very open and simultaneously distressed.”

Many film critics were equally profuse in their praise of Ruffalo’s efforts in Lonergan’s film directing debut, “You Can Count on Me,” which Lonergan also wrote. Cast as a physically and emotionally unruly younger brother to Laura Linney’s responsible, no-nonsense sister, Ruffalo once again was able to locate the rumpled, rebellious charm in a potentially annoying, even unattractive character.

“He’s very direct emotionally and it makes him very exciting as an actor,” Lonergan says. “And that’s how he is as a friend too.”

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Until Ruffalo received the New York seal of approval, his tendency to make himself open and available wasn’t reciprocated by Hollywood.

“I couldn’t get a job here,” he says. “I went away to New York in ’97 and did [‘This Is Our Youth’], and it was a big hit. And I came back to L.A., and all the L.A. casting directors and producers and all these people are saying, ‘Where did you come from? Oh my God, where have you been all these years?’ And I said, ‘I’ve been right under your noses! Why don’t you do your jobs?!’ ”

Before New York, one casting director told him, “They don’t look for guys like you in Los Angeles. You aren’t the typical L.A. guy.” Evidently meaning that dark-complexioned Italian American looks weren’t the industry recipe du jour.

So during his 20s, while his TV and film career was going nowhere, Ruffalo tended bar in Los Feliz and patiently plugged away at Shakespeare, Beckett, O’Neill and Lanford Wilson, as well as wacky one-acts and the wayward oeuvre of prolific L.A. playwright Justin Tanner. His L.A. theater credits total dozens of performances, and he has directed five plays here.

The personal relationships he developed doing L.A. theater also continue to sustain him, Ruffalo says. Both he and “Margaret” author McNeil are members of Page Ninety-Three Productions, a collective of actors, writers and directors, several of whom originally trained at the Stella Adler Conservatory in Hollywood. One of Ruffalo’s first teachers from those formative years, Joanne Linville, now serves as artistic director of the company, which is producing “Margaret” in association with Nancy Babka and Gary Blumsack.

Having watched him pay dues for a decade, Linville says her protege’s “overnight” success “is not surprising to me at all. I think it’s endless where he can go, really.”

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It’s a measure of Ruffalo’s equanimity, which sometimes masquerades as nonchalance, that he’s able to make light of his past career struggles. Yes, he admits, he used to be bitter about Hollywood’s early snubs. But what’s the point?

“I think things happen in their good time,” he says gently. “And in a lot of ways, maybe I wasn’t ready. And all those years of struggling here built character. You know, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Ruffalo has had plenty of chances to test that theory in his 33 years. First, there was his parents’ breakup, the result of family problems that began when he was in his teens.

“My dad was a crazy kind of entrepreneur at the time. He started as a construction painter and went back to that. But sandwiched in the middle of that, he was an entrepreneur, inventor, dreamer, schemer. And we moved around every year for a good 10 years. It was hard, just the tearing apart, torn from your friends and from your familiarity. Really then all you have left is the people around you, and that’s your family. And it was hard because we had that tearing, and then the anger, I think, and resentment and frustration. It would implode and it would be focused toward each other.”

Simultaneously, there was the darkness of the San Diego beach community where he grew up after his family’s move from Wisconsin.

“It was just a weird place--really kind of a bad, negative, mean quality there. There’s a really hard quality about some people who live at the ocean. There was a lot of crystal meth. My family went nuts there, my brothers and sisters, the whole family splintered then.”

Today, Ruffalo, the eldest of four children, says he is very close with his brother and two sisters, all of whom, like their mother, work as hairdressers.

Finally, there was his best friend’s suicide at age 24, a tragedy that ultimately helped him break free of his own downward spiral. Growing up, Ruffalo says, he felt tremendous guilt over his parents’ separation, as if somehow he were responsible.

“There’s been several circumstances in my life where I felt like I could have saved people and I lost them. And I really did not like myself. Didn’t like the way I looked, didn’t like the way I sounded, didn’t like the feelings that I was having.” His self-recriminations peaked after his friend’s death--then slowly began to recede.

“I realized how devastating [suicide] was to the people around you, and how devastating it was to me. And it changed me in the way that I just said, ‘I want to live and I’m going to live, doubly: I’m living for him too now.’ And that was basically a turning point for me.”

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It was partly that life-altering circumstance that drew Ruffalo to “Margaret,” a coming-of-age tale that playwright McNeil, 43, based on his own youthful brush with suicide. In McNeil’s case, it was a neighborhood girl who took her life when McNeil was 15. “It was very difficult for the little community to deal with such a thing,” McNeil says, “and it stayed with me for a long time, the mystery of it.”

The play unfolds through the eyes of a young boy who was in love with the victim, Margaret, and unites with her sister in trying to resolve the event’s aftermath. “It’s ultimately about love,” Ruffalo says of the play, the second McNeil work that he has directed. “It’s kind of [about] the tearing down of the American family, it’s about the Vietnam War, the loss of innocence of Americans. And in the end, there’s ultimately the hope of love.”

McNeil says that Ruffalo’s intuitive empathy for others’ suffering, as well as his skillful handling of actors, made him the obvious choice to direct “Margaret.”

“He has the ability to be empathetic with just about everyone, which makes him a great actor,” McNeil says. “He can see the heart in people who have difficulty in society.”

Ruffalo agrees with his friend that privately tormented misfits--like Terry in “You Can Count on Me”--are close to his heart.

“Those kinds of people are very interesting to me, because they’re the people who people write off. They’re alienated, they don’t feel like they [belong] in the world. But somewhere in them is a voice. And maybe it takes some time for them to find their way in the world.”

For the next several weeks, Ruffalo simply needs to keep finding his way between Los Angeles and Valencia while shooting continues on “Windtalkers.” Also upcoming are the Miramax romantic comedy “A View From the Top,” in which he plays one of Paltrow’s several love interests; “XX/XY,” a dramatic love story from first-time director and painter Austin Chick; and Rod Lurie’s “The Castle,” a military prison drama starring Robert Redford. He’s still hoping a distributor can be found for Dan Bootzin’s romantic comedy, “Life Drawing,” Ruffalo’s first substantial film role.

Because of the possibility of an actors’ strike later this year, and because he and his wife, actress Sunrise Coigney, are expecting their first child, Ruffalo says he wants to work as much as possible.

Sometimes he calls up Lonergan to trade horror stories about the strange life they’ve embarked on. They’re also planning another project down the road, maybe an adaptation of Nathanael West’s “Miss Lonelyhearts.”

“Yeah, we laugh about it,” Ruffalo says. “We’re like, ‘Is this insane or what? Look at us, a couple of knuckleheads!’ And we laugh about it, we laugh about these meetings we have, these just insane studio heads. You wouldn’t even believe it if you saw it in a movie.”

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“Margaret,” Hudson Backstage Theatre, 6537 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays 7 p.m. Ends Feb. 25. $15; $5 discounts for seniors, students and group sales. (323) 856-4200.