COFFEE ACHIEVER

Spotlight

It's called 'Le Tigre,'" Mark Ruffalo says (in mocking tribute to Ben Stiller's Zoolander) of his trademark soulful stare, which audiences first fell for when he starred opposite Laura Linney in Kenneth Lonergan's Sundance hit, You Can Count on Me. Originally from Wisconsin, Ruffalo always knew he wanted to be an actor. "My great-grandfather played Pulcinella in the cornmedia dell'orte," he says. "I guess it's in the blood." In 1995, after years of bartending and doing non-Equity theater in Los Angeles, Ruffalo met Lonergan, who cast him in an early version of his play This Is Our Youth. The show, with Ruffalo in it, eventually transferred to New York and became an Off Broadway smash. "That play changed my life, and his life, and everyone's involved, really." In 2000, however, Ruffalo suffered a life-changing event of darker proportions. He was filming The Last Castle with Robert Redford and had just been cast in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs when doctors discovered a brain tumor. "It came at the apex of my career," he says, "and suddenly everything came to a screeching halt. I thought I would have to give up acting." Instead, after surgery and 10 months' rehabilitation, Ruffalo is fully recovered and hotter than ever. Next month, he'll appear as Gwyneth Paltrow's "good guy" boyfriend in View from the Top, and as a postgraduate "boy-man" trying to figure out his place in the world in XX/XY. Then he'll star opposite Meg Ryan in Jane Campion's In the Cut. "It's a real departure for me," says the 34-year-old actor, who has a son with his wife, Sunrise. "I get to play a real man. Nothing boyish in him at all."

KRISTA SMITH

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