I’m going to be honest. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I walked into Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things. The fevered sexual awakening of a character, Bella, played by Emma Stone in one of her best roles, is unlike anything else I’ve seen on the big screen this year. While it’s Stone’s performance in Poor Things that’s attracting a lot of attention, for me I had the most fun watching Mark Ruffalo just absolutely chewing up the scenery as aging rake Duncan Wedderburn. Turns out, though, it only happened because Ruffalo decided to say “fuck it.”
The actor recently admitted he was actually scared to join the Poor Things cast in a role that “might be outside [his] scope.” He’s older than he was once, for one, and he had been thinking about where his career as an actor could be going over the past few years. While he wasn’t sure he could pull off playing Bella’s older, yet still childish lover, he really went for it, telling High Snobiety why he adopted the attitude he did.
