Robert Downey Jr. calls Mark Ruffalo "bangable" and other nice things in Actors on Actors interview

When you’ve known a buddy for what feels like a lifetime, your filter around them pretty much disappears. That’s clearly the case for Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr., who were first introduced by their then-girlfriends almost three decades ago, before going on to costar in David Fincher’s Zodiac as well as all those Marvel films. In the first of Variety’s Actors on Actors series, the friends and colleagues chatted about their most recent projects Oppenheimer and Poor Things, working with directors Christopher Nolan and Yorgos Lanthimos, and, yes, how good Ruffalo looks naked.

After praising many other aspects of Ruffalo’s performance as the “relentlessly self-centered Duncan Wedderburn” in Poor Things, Downey gets to, er, the elephant in the room. “If we want to talk about courage under fire, the fact that 11 seconds into this performance, you are buck naked and going for it in a way that… was very [raw]… that to me is the ultimate risk,” he said, to which Ruffalo expressed his doubts that “nobody wants to see [my] old ass anymore.” Not true, according to Downey, who called his friend “pretty bangable” while also saying that there was no one he’s ever come across “who is more anxious to not be vain past the point where it is necessary to achieve an end for their work.” In its own, very Hollywood way, the whole thing is genuinely really sweet.

Mark Ruffalo wasn’t the only one who received love for his performance. “You do this part in Oppenheimer, and it’s just another level. You break it all down,” the Poor Things actor said of his counterpart’s stoic turn as U.S. Atomic Energy Commission official Lewis Strauss in Nolan’s magnum opus. “We see a total character, a physical change, a vocal change, a different kind of guy. None of the mannerisms of anything that we’d ever seen before that you had perfected and had become so second nature to you. That discipline and that reach for that next thing is really admirable and why I have always looked up to you and why I continue to look up to you.”

The veteran actors also took some time to shout out the directors who were able to pull these exceptional performances out of them. For Ruffalo, it took Yorgos Lanthimos’ advent of a rehearsal period that was “10 days of just theater games: dancing, singing, movement, playing with each other’s faces and bodies” to get into the zone. “You just get really free. And you could go broad or you could go small and no one’s judging. You can’t do anything wrong. You can’t do anything right, really,” he said. Alternatively, Nolan’s Oppenheimer set was “very spartan, like 100 people making a watch every day.” “You kind of feel like you’re being stripped of your armor, which he does intentionally,” Downey explained. “I’ve never in my career worked with a less judgmental director… He said, ‘We do all these things to give you the time you need, or I might want.’”

But while Downey certainly got a lot of buzz for his role in the summer smash hit, he seems to have no qualms about sharing the spotlight. “Poor Things is already making a splash as it’s on the horizon of coming out,” he said. “You’re next buddy. That’s all I got to say.”