Controversial star Mark Ruffalo wasn’t at the Toronto International Film Festival’s opening night to support his latest movie because the Marvel actor is shooting his series “Task” in Philadelphia, Page Six Hollywood has learned.
The actor, who has become the most visible (and controversial) critic of the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, was conspicuously absent from the gala opening of “Being Heumann.”
Some were likely breathing a sigh of relief that the focus was on the screen. For those hoping (or fearing) Ruffalo might launch a fresh attack on David and Larry Ellison from the world stage of TIFF — there were no such fireworks last night.
When director Sian Heder took to the stage at the Princess of Wales Theatre to introduce her new project about disability rights trailblazer Judy Heumann — and tout the power of protest — she said, “This film is about what happens when people refuse to be invisible.”
But the elephant in the room wasn’t in the room.
A rep for Apple, which is distributing the awards-season hopeful, told Page Six Hollywood that “Mark is in production on his show ‘Task’ in Philadelphia and was unable to join us.”
That likely came as a relief to Apple, a company that is loath to controversy.
Back in 2023, Volodymyr Zelenskyy wanted to appear via video at the Cannes Film Festival premiere of Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” — and make the case for Ukraine to receive more money and weapons from the West. But sources told us at the time that Apple nixed it.
Ruffalo, who plays Carter administration bureaucrat Joseph Califano in the ’70s-set film and the biggest foil to the disabled community, has become particularly polarizing for conflating the merger with another global hotspot: Israel/Gaza.
The Hulk actor has been denounced by Paramount — and a broad swath of Jewish groups including the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League — for peddling “antisemitic tropes” in his social media posts in August that linked Jewish Paramount leadership to Israel’s military technology and accused them of being complicit in genocide.
Film festivals like Toronto and Cannes offer a unique global platform for sound bites and ideas to spread. Instead of Ruffalo getting the mic, the film’s cast, most of whom are disabled, held the spotlight, most notably Ruth Madeley, who plays the late Heumann. “I really believe, hope and trust that this is the start of something. It’s a major shift in the industry,” said the wheelchair-bound Madeley from the Princess of Wales stage.
The reviews on Ruffalo’s performance were mixed. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney said the four-time Oscar nominee was “doing a somewhat buffoonish impersonation” of the government apparatchik. But Variety’s Owen Gleiberman praised his introduction into the drama. “This is where the film becomes morally captivating,” and the role is “played with weary mid-century bureaucratic testiness,” Gleiberman wrote in a glowing review of the film.
Rather than Ruffalo, it was Dylan O’Brien, the film’s other star who’s familiar to theatergoers, who hit the red carpet and kept the conversation focused on the disabled.
Heder’s previous Apple film, “CODA,” won three Oscars in 2022, including Best Picture.
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