Mark Ruffalo reveals hardship of casting in 2007’s ‘Zodiac’: ‘Can’t forget’

According to Mark Ruffalo, things didn’t go as planned when he was cast in the 2007 serial killer film Zodiac.

The actor claimed in a recent interview with High Snobiety that a studio representative explicitly stated they didn’t really want him in the Paramount Pictures movie.

“I’ll never forget when they were negotiating my deal [for Zodiac], the studio negotiator literally said to my manager, ‘Look, we don’t give a shit about Mark Ruffalo, we don’t even want Mark Ruffalo in this movie, so you’re going to take what we’re offering you or forget it,’” Ruffalo recalled.

In David Fincher’s film Zodiac, two reporters, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr., became fixated on finding the identity of the murderer known as the Zodiac Killer, who went on a murdering rampage in San Francisco during the 1970s. In the film, Ruffalo played Detective David Toschi.

The Oscar-nominated actor wasn’t put off by those remarks, though, especially after he was cast in a role he never would have dreamed of: Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

“I was like… I had never done that. Studios, they weren’t coming to me in that way,” he said of his first call from Marvel. “So the fact that Joss Whedon came to me for the Hulk was so out of the blue. It’s a tough part – how do you get away with playing a character that doesn’t want to do what everybody wants him to do and sustain that? It’s like a trap. I read it, and I was like, ‘I can do something with this.’”