Parenting & Family Quote by Mark Ruffalo

Ruffalo is quietly praising the one thing adult performers spend years relearning: how to stop managing the moment. When he calls kids "great acting partners", he isn’t being cute about childlike innocence; he’s pointing to a technical advantage. Children, on set, haven’t fully absorbed the adult reflex to self-edit, to anticipate how a beat will play, to protect their image. They respond before they explain. That kind of immediacy forces the scene to stay alive.

The telling phrase is "totally present". In actor-speak, presence is currency: it’s the difference between delivering lines and listening. Ruffalo suggests that kids don’t treat acting as a display of control; they treat it as play with stakes. "Even when they're acting, they're still available" is a small indictment of grown-up acting, where performance can become a sealed container - polished, consistent, dead. Availability means porousness: you can be surprised, interrupted, even thrown off, and still stay in character.

His examples - "crack them up", "something weird will happen" - nod to the chaos of real life that productions try to sand down. Ruffalo’s subtext is that unpredictability isn’t a threat to truth; it’s often the shortcut to it. Culturally, it lands as a counterpoint to an industry obsessed with precision and branding. The kids aren’t thinking about the clip, the press tour, the meme. They’re thinking about the next second. That’s why he wants them near the camera: they drag everyone else back into the present tense.