The world could have lost Mark Ruffalo prematurely. In the early aughts the then-future big screen Bruce Banner was diagnosed with a vestibular schwannoma, which is a form of a brain tumor. It was benign, but removing the mass resulted in temporary partial facial paralysis and hearing loss. That went away, though he still can’t hear out of his left ear. It certainly could have been worse. Indeed, Ruffalo might not have ever discovered the condition had he not had an eerily prophetic dream.
“I had one of those 4 a.m. calls, and I woke up probably around 3, and I just had this crazy dream. It wasn’t like any other dream I had had,” Ruffalo recently revealed on the podcast SmartLess. “It was just like ‘You have a brain tumor.’ It wasn’t even a voice, it was just pure knowledge: ‘You have a brain tumor, and you have to deal with it immediately.’”
At the time he was filming the 2001 prison thriller The Last Castle, and though it was just a dream, he still brought it up to the on-set doctor.
“I said, ‘Listen, this is gonna sound crazy, but I had this dream last night that I have a brain tumor,’” Ruffalo recalled. “And she said, ‘That is crazy, but there’s no reason that you should have to worry about it, I’ll order you a CAT scan and we’ll go right after work today and we’ll show how crazy you are.’”
Sure enough, they found a mass the size of a golf ball, and the rest is history.
Thing is, Ruffalo withheld telling his wife about his diagnosis until after the birth of their first son.
“I was just like, I can’t. She’s already like, ‘Oh god, him again? Does everything gotta be about him?’” Ruffalo explained. “So I just couldn’t. And like a week after the baby I had to go in and meet the neurologist and decide what I was gonna do. I hadn’t told her until the night before.”
His wife did not react lightly, as one would imagine. “When I told Sunny about it, first she thought I was joking, and she just burst into tears and said, ‘I always knew you were gonna die young!’” he remembered. “If you wrote it in a script, it’d be too much.”
The lesson? If you have a dream about having a disease that’s hard to detect, perhaps it’s best to go hypochondriac. That way you won’t rob people of joining what’s become the Philadelphia Extended Universe.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)