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Mark Ruffalo speech at his Hollywood Walk of Fame unveiling ceremony on Thursday, February 8, 2024 at 6777 Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, USA. This video is only available for editorial use in all media and worldwide. To ensure compliance and proper licensing of this video, please contact us. ©MaximoTV
Mark Ruffalo speech at his Hollywood Walk of Fame unveiling ceremony on Thursday, February 8, 2024 at 6777 Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, USA. This video is only available for editorial use in all media and worldwide. To ensure compliance and proper licensing of this video, please contact us. ©MaximoTV
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00:00 (coins jingling)
00:02 - On behalf of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce,
00:06 I now declare today Mark Ruffalo Day in Hollywood!
00:11 (audience cheering)
00:14 Take it away.
00:17 - Oh man, I don't know who these people are talking about.
00:23 Man, wow.
00:29 Jen, I have your glasses.
00:30 So thank you, thank you, thank you.
00:39 Thank you Tim, thank you Fincher, thank you Jen,
00:44 thank you Laura Dern, thank you Naomi Watts,
00:47 thank you for Billy Crudup, thank you.
00:49 And thank you Searchlight Pictures and Disney
00:54 and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce
00:57 for this distinction.
00:59 I know this is actually a very prime piece of real estate.
01:04 So I appreciate your generosity.
01:08 David Greenbaum, Alan Bergman,
01:14 thank you for your support of this film
01:16 and the support of me, it means so much to me, thank you.
01:20 So before I go any further, I wanna do something
01:23 that my Native American friends have asked me to do
01:27 to honor their part in America.
01:31 And that's to acknowledge that we are on
01:34 what used to be their homelands.
01:36 So I wanna thank the Gabrielino, Tonya people
01:44 for hosting us here in spirit today.
01:50 Just to start things right, calling the ancestors,
01:55 have them embrace all of us here in blessings.
01:58 I just, I'm so moved, I'm so grateful for this
02:05 and I'm so grateful for these tributes
02:07 from people that I go so far back with,
02:11 who I really started all this with
02:14 and who I love and admire and who represent
02:17 so many different parts of why I'm here today.
02:19 Thank you for doing that for me and thanks for your words.
02:25 It's just very humbling to me,
02:26 I've been standing here in tears the whole time.
02:29 I came here when I was 18 years old, like Tim said,
02:35 I literally got off of the bus
02:38 and I was here on Hollywood Boulevard,
02:41 I didn't go anywhere else, I came right here.
02:44 I walked into the Stella Adler Conservatory,
02:47 scared poopless, and there was a woman there,
02:54 Joanne Linville, who said,
02:56 "What are you doing here, darling?"
02:58 I said, "Ah, man, I don't know.
03:04 "I'm 18 years old now and I feel like
03:10 "I've hit the end of the road.
03:11 "And I don't know what the hell I'm gonna do with my life,
03:17 "but is it too late to be an actor?
03:20 "Can I come here?"
03:24 I don't know how to audition,
03:26 so I don't know what to show you,
03:28 but all I know is that I want to dedicate my life
03:31 to being an actor.
03:33 And she said to me, "Well, that's good, darling,
03:36 "you're in the right place."
03:38 And that was where it all started.
03:42 And I took the shortcut to becoming an actor
03:46 by spending seven years at the Stella Adler Acting Academy.
03:50 (audience cheering)
03:53 Thank you, baby, my baby just told me to fix my glasses
03:59 so that I don't look like this.
04:02 And yeah, because I was working on my craft, man.
04:07 (audience laughing)
04:11 Exactly.
04:16 I hear you, man, and I feel that.
04:20 And we need to be doing more of that for each other.
04:24 Yeah, so, you know, I came here at 18
04:31 and I believed in myself and a dream
04:33 that only an 18-year-old, in a way,
04:35 only an 18-year-old can,
04:38 totally oblivious to the fact
04:40 of how fricking hard it was gonna be
04:42 until that dawned on me 10 years later
04:45 when I was begging my brother for money
04:47 to get my car out of impound
04:50 because of the hundred tickets that I didn't pay.
04:53 You know what I'm talking about, Angelenos?
04:55 And he said to me,
04:59 "Maybe it's time to think about another career."
05:03 But he gave me that money and he always supported me.
05:06 And his name's Scott Ruffalo.
05:09 And he's not here with us today, but he's here,
05:14 and I know you're here, Scotty.
05:16 Same with my sister, Tanya.
05:18 They followed me out to Hollywood to follow their dreams.
05:23 And my grandmother used to send me 20 bucks a week
05:28 in an envelope with a little note that said,
05:30 "I believe in you.
05:33 "Stay put.
05:34 "You can do this."
05:36 And that 20 bucks bought me a bag of apples,
05:41 a jar of peanut butter, and a jar of jelly,
05:45 and a loaf of bread, and I lived off that.
05:48 Tim and I, I used to walk up and down this boulevard
05:53 every single day, thousands of times,
05:55 and I'd mouth every single person's name,
05:59 even though I don't know who half of them were.
06:01 Marlon Brando, Charlie Chaplin,
06:06 Greta Garbo, Kermit the Frog,
06:13 Big Bird, where it's a very rarified company.
06:17 But that was so far from my experience,
06:19 'cause I was so fricking poor, and I was starving,
06:23 and I didn't have a car, and it was really hard
06:25 to live in Los Angeles, but I was here
06:27 with all of my friends going to school
06:29 who are just the same, who are after just the same thing,
06:34 to share with the world a little bit of the greatness
06:42 that they feel is inside themselves.
06:44 And so I wanna say to you young people here,
06:50 to you actors here, from Stella Adler,
06:52 I know you're all here.
06:54 (audience cheering)
06:57 And everybody else who comes to Los Angeles with a dream,
07:00 there's nothing that's difficult in life
07:06 that isn't in some way worth it,
07:09 whether you make it or not.
07:11 And that nothing worth a good goddamned life is easy.
07:15 So hang on, 'cause there's no reason
07:19 I should have been here, and I tried to quit
07:21 five, six different times, and I had people,
07:23 my friends here said don't quit, my mom said don't quit,
07:27 my brother said don't quit, my wife said don't quit.
07:31 And there's no reason I should be here, but I'm here.
07:37 (audience cheering)
07:40 I came here and that woman Joanne Linville, my teacher,
07:46 she showed me so much about acting,
07:50 she taught me all the fundamentals of acting,
07:53 but she also taught me what it was to be a human being,
07:56 the generosity.
07:59 Okay.
08:05 (audience laughing)
08:09 Joanne passed away a few years ago,
08:13 and we didn't really get to honor her because of COVID-19.
08:16 And she's here now too.
08:23 Stella Adler, who's my teacher,
08:25 her star is right here in front of me.
08:28 And I owe her a great deal, and I wanna say that
08:35 to you Joanne, thank you so much for this beautiful life,
08:39 for taking this kid from Wisconsin who came from
08:42 a blue collar family, who were immigrants from Italy,
08:47 who really struggled to make a beautiful life
08:55 for themselves, but who were not artists really,
08:58 and somehow I ended up here.
09:04 So I wanna wrap this up by thanking the people
09:09 who've been part of my life through all of this.
09:15 The thing about a life is, it's never done alone.
09:20 A career as an actor is never done alone,
09:25 it takes so many people to do it.
09:28 And so I wanna say with this star,
09:33 it's not just mine, it's yours.
09:37 It's you folks out there who are my fans,
09:40 who basically paid for us having this career.
09:45 It's for you, my friends here who've been supporting me
09:48 all these years, who I take, for Perry,
09:52 for the other actors that I learned so much from
09:55 and love so much, it's from my meditation teacher,
10:00 Betty Jones, who's here, who's enriched my life so much.
10:03 It's from my publicist, Jessica,
10:06 it's from my lawyer, Keith, it's for Shanie,
10:09 it's for Billy, it's for Aline, it's for Scott,
10:12 it's for my friends from upstate New York, Hillary.
10:15 It's for all of you guys, no one does this alone,
10:21 and it's for my friends from Stella Adler,
10:24 John Jack, Tim, Chris, Rick, Wendy,
10:30 who else is here, Chris Thornton, and Bonnie McNeil,
10:33 the great Bonnie McNeil.
10:35 (audience cheering)
10:38 And it's for my wife, Sunrise,
10:40 who's been with me through all of it,
10:48 who believed in me more than anybody,
10:52 who moved me out of a garage,
10:55 who made me go and pay for my bench warrant.
11:00 Yes, I had a warrant out for my arrest when we met.
11:05 She told me I needed a credit card,
11:10 otherwise I wasn't serious.
11:12 And she told me the truth.
11:16 You told me the truth, you always tell me the truth,
11:22 and that's hard, and I don't take it easily.
11:26 And my kids, Bella and Keed and Odette,
11:32 you've taught me so much about being a parent,
11:37 about being a man, about being an actor,
11:41 and this is your star, my whole family,
11:44 in ways that you will not understand for some time.
11:49 And I wanna say just for all of you people
11:51 who showed up today, God bless you all,
11:54 even my brother over there who wants to express himself,
11:59 I believe in that, even if we don't agree.
12:03 And all you folks--
12:05 - [Man] The censorship of Maxine Fripp!
12:08 (laughing)
12:10 - Okay, we know now.
12:11 (audience cheering)
12:14 We all listen to you now.
12:16 I see green pieces here, my brothers and sisters
12:20 in the fight for equality, for climate change,
12:24 for decency of human beings,
12:27 for the end of these senseless, horrific wars.
12:32 I appreciate y'all for your humanity,
12:38 and the more we can dig in and lean into our humanity today,
12:42 the better the world will be, and that's what we need.
12:45 And so we love each other, love each other,
12:49 and that's it, man, I mean, that's all I got to say.
12:52 That was long.
12:53 (audience cheering)
12:56 Thank you, guys, thank you.
13:00 (audience cheering)
13:03 (applause)
13:05 (whooshing)