Keen Ruffalo is Just Getting Started

Sitting down with Keen Ruffalo, you get the sense that he is still catching up to what is happening to him. He has a cold from being run down after an insane two weeks of press, has tripled his Instagram following in roughly the same amount of time, and continues to watch his breakout role in Sterling Point generate fan edit after fan edit (Team Sully and Connor, obviously). When asked about how he is handling the unnaturally fast pace of people becoming aware of him, he seems unsure of where to put all of the newfound online attention, “It’s messed up, man,” he says. “I’m like, oh my God, okay!”

It’s not every day that the annoying older brother becomes one of a show’s most interesting characters, but writer-director Megan Park gives Ruffalo plenty to work with in Connor. He can be selfish and tender, obnoxious and perceptive, a guy whose Camp Rock-themed birthday party and Barry’s Bootcamp habit somehow coexist without explanation. Ruffalo doesn’t flatten his character into the asshole brother or the lovable brother but rather lives in the contradiction. That’s what makes Connor such a standout- he is a true representation of what it means to not represent good or bad cleanly but just exist as you are. Fans have taken Connor in, as they have Keen himself. Sitting down with him, the buzz is worth it. This is an actor that will continue to surprise us.

Meeting someone in the midst of being discovered, it’s interesting hearing about what the outside world may not think of as a newfound stress. From his perspective, he is tired, sick, grateful, and slightly overwhelmed by social media and trying to remember that posting is apparently part of his job now.

“I feel obligated to post, which I hate,” he says. He describes himself as reclusive and says taking pictures is simply not the way his brain works. The night before this interview, the members of Green Day are with him at the Nimrods premiere. Ruffalo only realizes in our meeting that he barely thought to photograph it.

“I wasn’t really thinking, ‘Oh, I should take selfies with these guys,'” he says. “It’s just not where my head goes.”

It is easy to turn that into some grand statement about fame, but Ruffalo doesn’t. He even worries that saying he doesn’t like social media sounds pretentious. That instinct comes up a lot over the course of the conversation: he will say something earnest and then immediately undercut himself before anyone else can. It makes him funny, but it also makes him seem unusually aware for a newer actor. This is most likely because while Keen is new to acting himself, he has been around it for quite a while, as the son of well-known actor Mark Ruffalo.

Even the children of Marvel heroes get sick, and Keen’s cold seems to be winning today’s battle, until we approach the subject of acting methods. Suddenly, Keen has his energy sources replenished, listing out teachers and techniques, almost laughing about how ridiculous it would be to think artists must choose just one approach, “which is such a load of horseshit because there’s no correct way.” The new method he wants to delve deeper into is actually something much less traditional than the likes of Meisner and Adler. It’s the Dream Technique.

“You just start journaling every day you wake up and you write down whatever you can remember about your dreams. And that slowly trains your brain to keep track of it more.”

He walks us through where this takes you as an actor. “Once you get to that point, you start meditating on your character when you go to bed. Whatever dreams you would have you find the meaning in that through your character…it’s pretentious sounding, I’m sure.” There it is again- the earnest interest, followed by the undercut.

When it came to how he prepared for Sterling Point, his rehearsal process sounded a lot different. There wasn’t really one, and not for lack of trying so much as the physics of a show this size. “We didn’t really know each other all that much when we started,” he admits. Megan Park had arranged some hangouts for the female half of the cast; Ruffalo and the guys got no such head start. So, he built his own version of one by initiating a group chat and a string of dinner plans. “That was really cool,” he says, sounding faintly surprised by his own initiative. “It made it very easy and comfortable to talk with everybody.” It is a small detail, but it tracks with everything else about him- less interested in what’s owed to him than in quietly doing the unglamorous work that makes an ensemble truly feel like one.

None of that unglamorous work matters more than what he built with Ella Rubin, who plays his fraternal twin Annie. When asked about twin telepathy, about the mythology of shared pain and secret languages, Ruffalo does the actor’s version of politely declining to overclaim. “There’s no way me and Ella could know what that feels like,” he says, laughing at the premise before he even finishes the sentence. So instead of borrowing a feeling neither of them has real access to, he went practical: start from having a sibling in real life, then extrapolate outward. 

“If you spent every single moment from conception with that person, how would that change your relationship?…Me and Ella are very different people, just like in real life as anyone is,” he says. “It really was like, listen, I love you, but you’re gonna drive me crazy.” That, honestly, is the whole show.

Given that Connor spends most of season one being catastrophically bad at introspection, I ask Ruffalo whether he thinks the character is actually ready for a real relationship (not to belittle what he and Capucine had). To him, Connor has more foundational work ahead of him first. “You need to help yourself before you can help anyone else,” he says. But he lights up talking about Ramona, who, to him, Connor may understand better than he understands his own twin. “He relates to her a lot more than he relates to Annie,” Ruffalo says. “He really does love her. He wants to look out for her, I think.” He is aware there has been online debate about the dynamic, and he is unbothered by it, if anything a little protective of the chemistry he and his co-star landed on together.

Then he brings up, entirely unprompted, the thing every corner of the Sterling Point fandom has feelings about the internet’s enthusiastic shipping of Connor and Sully. Ruffalo just laughs. “Funny enough, me and Nico actually talked about that when we were shooting- being like, that would be awesome,” he says, adding that the two of them are genuinely close off camera, which helps explain the chemistry people keep clipping. Asked more about Connor’s readiness for a partner, he doesn’t hesitate. “I wouldn’t say Connor’s straight, either. I think he’s probably pan, at the end of the day. He likes who he likes.” 

Then, Ruffalo was made to answer the most difficult question of them all: Team Rory or Team Ellis. Ruffalo doesn’t pick either in a genius turn of events. “He’s Team Gay Boyfriend,” he says instantly, delighted with himself. “He loves that guy, honestly.” Even Ruffalo, separate from the character entirely, seems fully on board.

What makes Connor genuinely interesting, and what Ruffalo clearly treats as the character’s whole thesis statement, is his refusal to be redeemed on schedule. “That’s not really represented enough,” he says of the douchey-yet-decent older brother, an archetype he thinks television rarely let’s exist without dimming it. His reference point is a very specific teen-drama type. The bully who slowly works out who he actually is, without the show stripping away the parts of him that made him difficult in the first place. Connor, in Ruffalo’s opinion, carries a version of that same toughness, minus the mask. “I won’t even say it’s a mask personality…It’s pretty out there.” Which is as good an explanation as any for a guy who insists on a Camp Rock-themed birthday party, complete with Alison Stoner cutouts, and attends Barry’s Bootcamp religiously. Ruffalo remembers reading that detail in the audition sides and being sold instantly: “He goes to Barry’s Boot Camp, okay.”

As for what happens if Sterling Point gets picked up for a second season, Ruffalo has thoughts, most of them involving getting his character out of paradise and into his own stomping grounds. He wants Connor to track down his biological parents. He wants an actual redemption arc, one that costs the character something. And he wants Ramona, freshly transplanted to New York, to realize the life she thought she wanted isn’t the one she wants at all, with Connor being the one to help her figure that out. “Trying to act like a responsible older brother,” he says, “even though he’s kind of not good at it.” 

Ruffalo’s interests extend beyond acting or being a good brother. When asked about future ambitions he reveals he is already putting together a production company with two friends, with an early focus on horror and thrillers and a particular fascination with the corners of internet culture that Hollywood has only recently begun to notice. Ruffalo has been following filmmakers like Curry Barker and Kane Parsons since before their work moved from YouTube into feature films, and their success clearly means something to him beyond fandom. He sees it as proof that the industry can still make room for people it hasn’t seen before.

“How else are we supposed to grow as an industry without that?”

Of course, he is less generous when the industry starts poking around the same obscure internet worlds he has loved for years. When I mention studios increasingly mining online horror for ideas, he reacts like a kid watching the adults discover his favorite hiding spot. “Oh God, they know,” he says, before landing on a better summary:

“Get your grubby fucking hands off of my internet IPs!”

So, where does he think it, all goes next? No Obsession sequel- “I think it ended in the perfect way, adding anything else would diminish it.” However, he would take an expanded world of Backrooms, ideally centered on the mysterious company doing the exploring, and yes, obviously, he would drop everything to work with either Parsons or Curry Barker if the call ever came.

It’s a funny position for Ruffalo to be in. He’s making the case for new faces at exactly the moment he is becoming one himself. Sterling Point has introduced him to an audience at internet speed, while Nimrods arrives almost immediately behind it. But if there is an eagerness to capitalize on the moment, it doesn’t come across as a plan for fame. He seems much more excited by the possibility of getting better at acting, making strange horror movies with his friends, and seeing what Connor might become if the show continues. When asked what he would personally like to improve in another season, after giving a thoughtful answer about Connor’s future, he finally lands on something simpler: “Honestly, I’d say probably just, like, enunciating more. I’m not great at that.”

This shoot was photographed at @hollywoodland.forgotten