At the recent WonderCon comic book and popular arts convention, Reelz had the opportunity to speak with actor Ryan Reynolds about his experience acting on a blue screen stage for scenes in Green Lantern. Some actors complain that blue (or green) screen acting is artificial and detracts from their process, but Reynolds said that you simply have to use your imagination and "embrace that thing from when you were a child, when you were a kid, that yearning to pretend." In a recent interview with Details, actor Mark Ruffalo echoed Reynolds' comments about childhood and imagination when discussing his upcoming turn as another green-themed superhero, the Hulk, in writer-director Joss Whedon's The Avengers.
Unlike in Ang Lee's The Hulk and Louis Leterrier's The Incredible Hulk, in which Eric Bana and Edward Norton only played Bruce Banner and stunt actors did the motion-capture work that generated the Hulk, Ruffalo will actually be doing the motion-capture work himself in The Avengers. Ruffalo compared it to being a kid again and to acting on stage.
It's like being back in the forest as a 7-year-old, living in my imagination and creating this other world...it relies on your imagination, your ability to project outside of yourself, to be the watcher and the watched. A stage actor has to be able to do that, because you're telling the story with your body as much as your face and voice. I walk in front of a monitor, and there I am as the Hulk. I raise my right arm, he raises it, but he raises it as a 250-pound right arm, with all that weight and mass.
When asked if he had to undergo a "crash workout regimen" to play the Hulk like several of his co-stars in The Avengers, Ruffalo joked, "Look I'm eating guacamole and f*cking potato chips... You think Tom Cruise does this?" According to both Ruffalo and Whedon, The Avengers will be going into production the first week of May. It is slated for release on May 4, 2012.
