Mark Ruffalo

He spent years bartending and racked up roughly 800 auditions before Kenneth Lonergan cast him in You Can Count on Me (2000). Critics compared him to a young Marlon Brando. The following year, a vivid dream told him he had a brain tumor. He went to the doctor and found a mass the size of a golf ball behind his left ear. Surgery left him permanently deaf in one ear and briefly paralyzed half his face. Most actors get one shot at a breakthrough. He had to survive his before he could use it.

Four Oscar nominations across 13 years means he never peaked and faded. The Kids Are All Right, Foxcatcher, Spotlight, Poor Things: different genres, different casts, consistent notices. The MCU Hulk role landed in 2012 when Edward Norton walked away, and he's been Bruce Banner in about a dozen Marvel films since. In 2025 he's in Bong Joon-ho's Mickey 17, and confirmed for Spider-Man: Brand New Day in 2026. Not many actors can say their franchise gig and their awards-circuit work have stayed parallel for this long.

In 2011, the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security added him to a terror advisory list for organizing screenings of a documentary about fracking. He kept going, eventually co-founding The Solutions Project, a clean energy nonprofit. His brother Scott was shot and killed in his Hollywood Hills home in December 2008, a homicide that remains unsolved. The activism looks like a Hollywood pose until you remember the state of Pennsylvania thought he was a credible enough threat to watch.