Mark Ruffalo Opens Up About Hiding Brain Tumour Diagnosis From Wife Until Treatment: I Just Couldn’t

Mark Ruffalo has revealed that he found out that he had a brain tumor more than 20 years ago when his wife was nine months pregnant with their first child. He then made a decision to wait until the boy's birth to break the news of his condition. The actor found out he was suffering from a benign vestibular schwannoma in 2001 after he had a dream that he had a brain tumour.

Mark Ruffalo’s wife reacts to the news of brain tumour 

While speaking at a podcast, Mark said, “When I told Sunny about it, at first she thought I was joking, and then she just burst into tears and said, 'I always knew you were gonna die young. I was just like, 'I can't,' she's already like, 'Oh God, him again, does everything gotta be about him?' And so I just couldn't.” 

Ruffalo further revealed that a week after their baby was born he had to meet with the neurologist to decide what he was going to do. Ruffalo had no symptoms except for an ear infection before the tumour was diagnosed. 

Speaking about the doctor visit, he said, “The nurse calls the doctor up, I could hear them talking in the other room. She comes in, she's kinda like a zombie and she says, 'You have a mass behind your left ear the size of a golf ball, and we don't know what it is. We can't tell until it's biopsied.”

Ruffalo had surgery to remove the tumour.

Ruffalo admits he found himself unsuitable for MCU roles

Ruffalo, along with Robert Downey Jr, recently shed light on the challenges they faced understanding the difficult dialogues of their Marvel characters and sci-fi scenes in the movie. Ruffalo pointed out that portraying the character in MCU films is similar to living in a different world which was “unsuitable” for him. He said, "It was such a different world. They didn’t really cast people like us. I’ll never forget, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m right for this.’ And you’re like, ‘Come on, Ruffalo, we got this.’ "

With inputs from IANS