• Faith: Christian
• Career: Actor
• Birthday:  November 22, 1967

Mark Ruffalo is an actor who started acting in the early 1990s and first gained recognition for his work in Kenneth Lonergan’s play “This Is Our Youth” and the drama film “You Can Count on Me.” Ruffalo went on to star in romantic comedies “Just Like Heaven,” “13 Going on 30,” and the thrillers “In the Cut,” “Zodiac,” and “Shutter Island.” He received a Tony Award nomination for his supporting role in the Broadway revival of “Awake and Sing!” in 2006. Ruffalo gained international recognition for playing Bruce Banner/Hulk since 2012 in the superhero franchise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

He gained nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing a sperm donor in “The Kids Are All Right,” Dave Schultz in “Foxcatcher,” Michael Rezendes in “Spotlight,” and a passionate lawyer in “Poor Things.” Ruffalo won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actor for playing a gay activist in the TV film “The Normal Heart” and a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor for his dual role as identical twins in “I Know This Much Is True.” Ruffalo was born in 1967 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He has two sisters, Tanya Marie, who died in 2023 and Nicole, and a brother, Scott, who died in 2008. Ruffalo attended both Catholic and progressive schools throughout his education. He has described himself as having been a “happy kid,” although he struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia and ADHD as a child and a young adult.

Ruffalo spent his teen years in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where his father worked. He competed in wrestling in junior high school and high school in Wisconsin and Virginia, graduating from First Colonial High School in Virginia Beach in 1986, where he acted for the Patriot Playhouse. Ruffalo moved with his family to San Diego, California and later to Los Angeles, where he took classes at the Stella Adler Conservatory and co-founded the Orpheus Theatre Company. With the theater company, he directed, wrote, and starred in a number of plays. He also spent close to a decade working as a bartender.

What religion is Mark Ruffalo?

Ruffalo identifies as a Christian. His father was Bahai, while his mother was Christian. He said, “I grew up in a household that had three religions in it, born-again Christianity, Catholicism, and Bahai’ism, so there were different viewpoints and a lot of debate about that, and I immediately began to understand that all these people that I loved very much had very strong feelings about faith, but all of them were valid to me. I felt that none of them, my grandmother, my father or my mother, was better or worse than the other.”