Mark Ruffalo

Bar-hopping? It’s all part of an intense job

It’s always handy when job-preparation involves bar-hopping.
That was the case for Emilia Jones, as she prepared for “Task” the intense, seven-week mini-series that stars Mark Ruffalo (shown here) and debuts at 9 p.m. Sunday (Sept. 7) on HBO.
Jones (23 and the star of the Oscar-winning “Coda”) is from England, where people seem to have an entirely different approach to words. Now she was playing someone rooted in the blue-collar traditions of small-town Pennsylvania. With dialect coach Susanne Sulby, she was on a mission.
“Two weeks before we started shooting, Susanne and I would go around bars and listen,” she said by Zoom. That soon felt natural. “It’s really fun; it’s not just an accent, it’s like an energy.” Read more…

Two Marvel stars,two miniseries, three big roles

There’s a reason we need all those big-deal cable and streaming mini-series.
They let Marvel stars remind us that they’re also serious actors. Now we have:
– Chris Evans in “Defending Jacob,” which is halfway through its eight-episode run on Apple TV+. He plays an assistant district attorney whose teen son becomes a murder suspect.
– Mark Ruffalo in “I Know This Much is True,” a six-parter that starts Sunday on HBO. With the help of editing, he plays twins (shown here). One of them is schizophrenic … which is not to be confused with when Paul Rudd recently played a guy and his clone in “Living With Yourself” on Netflix. Read more…