An Oscar-Season Family Reunion

You hear a lot on the awards campaign trail about films that foster a sense of family, and the actors who just can’t wait to reunite at a string of awards shows. It can be hard to know how much of that is true, but it’s also impossible to imagine anyone not being excited to reunite with Mark Ruffalo. Nominated for his fourth Oscar this year for his buffoonish, hilarious supporting turn in Poor Things, Ruffalo is recognized alongside a lot of his Poor Things collaborators, including costar Emma Stone, director Yorgos Lanthimos, and writer Tony McNamara. But to Ruffalo, those are just the people he spent weeks with in rehearsals “playing and goofing off and really being such idiots in front of each other.”

That’s just one small part of the magic of making Poor Things, as Ruffalo tells Kara Warner on this week’s Little Gold Men podcast. Diving so deep into period fashion he wore a corset to play the caddish Duncan, jumping into a kind of comedy he hadn’t done since his early 20s, trying things so wild in rehearsals even Willem Dafoe raised an eyebrow—it was all part of the process. And now that he and the Poor Things team are on the awards circuit together, he’s reuniting not just with them but with former costars like Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right) and Robert Downey Jr. (The Avengers). “I do feel like this is a really special year,” Ruffalo says. “I’ve seen every performance, which I rarely do, and I love them. To see Robert, [he’s] one of the all-time greats, and he’s done great work for a long time. And to see him being lauded the way he should be and should have been a long time ago is really sweet, and I love him.”   Hear all about that and much more on this week’s Little Gold Men, which also includes a conversation with American Fiction writer-director Cord Jefferson. Both he and Ruffalo were present at Monday’s starry and cheerful Oscar nominees luncheon—yet another Oscar-season reunion—which we’ll discuss in much more detail on Thursday’s episode.

Mark Ruffalo on His “Delicious” and Badly Behaved Poor Things Character