Mark Ruffalo, 56, panicked he was ‘too old’ for ‘Poor Things’ sex scenes with Emma Stone, 35
You poor thing.
Oscar-nominated actor Mark Ruffalo was worried about being “too old” in his sex scenes with Emma Stone in the science-fantasy film “Poor Things.”
“I didn’t know if I could pull this off,” Ruffalo, 56, told Perfect magazine in a recent interview. “I’ve never done anything like [‘Poor Things’] before.”
“So, like, the sex scenes,” continued Ruffalo. “Am I too old to be doing that kind of stuff? Does anyone want to see that?”
In a second Instagram post, the “Spotlight” actor, who appeared nude from the waist up in the cover shoot, mused that Hollywood is currently “in this prudish time for films.”
“Sexuality is so deeply connected to the psychology of a character. And it should be explored in that sense, too,” the “Zodiac” star explained.
During an episode of Variety‘s “Actors on Actors” series, the “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” star commented that he was initially concerned about baring it all for the Yorgos Lanthimos-directed movie.
“I was like, ‘Do I have to?’ All I can hear is, ‘Nobody wants to see your old ass anymore. Maybe you shouldn’t be doing movies like that anymore,’ ” he laughed.
“I mean, it’s my least favorite part of it, but I also saw it as very comedic and also, like, an extension of the physical comedy that we were already finding. So it was just another way to tell the story.”
“Poor Things,” which is based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel of the same name, tells the tale of Bella Baxter (Stone) who is resurrected by Dr. Godwin “God” Baxter (Willem Dafoe) by using a child’s brain before she runs off with a lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo).
According to Ruffalo, Lanthimos, 50, requested that he wear extra padding to pull off a thicker physique.
“Do you know I had an ass pad in?” Ruffalo told his Marvel co-star Robert Downey Jr. during the episode on YouTube.
“My legs were, like, four inches bigger,” he continued. “My calf was four [inches]. He [director Yorgos Lanthimos] really wanted the silhouette. So I was wearing a corset with shoulder pads, so I was so squeezed in.
“It was even more extreme. [Lanthimos] wanted me to look like a bird, so I had this whole built-out chest piece that never made it because it was just too much,” he said of one of the Greek filmmaker’s more eccentric ideas.
The bizarre film serves as a follow-up to writer Tony McNamara and Lanthimos’ 2018 flick “The Favourite,” which also starred Stone alongside Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz.
“Poor Things” scored several nominations during the 2024 Golden Globes and even took home a win when Stone beat out several front-runners in the best musical or comedy film category. She also took home the win at the Critics Choice Awards on Sunday.
“Playing Bella was one of the greatest joys of my life. I got to unlearn a lot of things in playing her. Unlearn parts of shame and societal stuff that gets put on us, and I’m still working on it,” Stone said during her acceptance speech. “This is the Critics Choice Awards — and it is about outside opinion — but I’m very grateful to the critics for this.”
She quipped: “But I’m just learning not to care what you think!”
