Mark Ruffalo tells me he has, until now, kinda shied away from playing the villain of the piece. He licks his lips as he declares that it’s “so much fun to finally get to play the bad guy.” He refers, of course, to his Duncan Wedderburn, the calculating cad of the first water he plays with zest in Yorgos Lanthimos’ delicious movie Poor Things.
The schemer Wedderburn sets his sights on Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter, but it is she who outwits him. “The bad ones are the best and I was scared of it,” he tells me at Saturday’s BAFTA Tea Party, set on a mammoth, chilly terrace at The Maybourne Beverly Hills.
As I toyed with Ruffalo’s thesis in my head, I was unable to conjure any roles he’s played that were, hitherto, downright dastardly.
His Bruce Banner stroke the Hulk in the Marvel movies is essentially decent, as was Mike Rezendes the crusading journalist he portrayed in the Oscar-winning Spotlight.
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