Mark Ruffalo was 33, married about a year, and his wife was pregnant with their first child. He had just finished a run on You Can Count on Me that put him on Hollywood’s radar for the first time, and he was in the final days of shooting The Last Castle with James Gandolfini and Robert Redford.
Then he woke up around 3 a.m. before a 4 a.m. call.
“I just had this crazy dream,” he told Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett on their SmartLess podcast. “It wasn’t like any other dream I’d ever had. 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.’”
He had no symptoms. The only thing out of the ordinary was an ear infection the night before, in his left ear.
He went to the doctor on set that day and told her about the dream. She thought he was being ridiculous, and said as much, but agreed to order a CAT scan after he wrapped for the day, largely to settle it.
The scan found a mass behind his left ear roughly the size of a golf ball.
A biopsy confirmed it was a vestibular schwannoma, also known as an acoustic neuroma. It’s a benign tumor that grows on the nerve running from the inner ear to the brain, and it affects roughly one person in 100,000 each year. Benign does not mean harmless. The tumor was sitting against his facial nerve, and it needed to come out.
Ruffalo did not tell his wife, Sunrise Coigney. “I didn’t tell Sunny because I know she had the birth plan, she did the yoga, she had the doula,” he said. “You know, we had the hot tub ordered.” He kept it to himself for two weeks, through the birth of their son Keen, and when he finally told her she assumed he was joking. Once she understood he wasn’t, her first response was, “I always knew you were going to die young.”
The surgery carried real risk to his hearing and to the facial nerve, which for a screen actor is a career. Ruffalo made his position clear to the doctors. “Take my hearing. Let me keep the face. Just let me be the father to this kid.”
He woke up with the left side of his face paralyzed and unable to close his eye. The paralysis lasted about a year before movement came back. The hearing did not. He has been deaf in his left ear ever since.
He also stepped away from work while he recovered, turning down the role of Merrill Hess in Signs, which went to Joaquin Phoenix.
In a 2013 interview with the Acoustic Neuroma Association, Ruffalo said he told almost no one at the time. “It was scary, obviously, and I also had an odd bit of shame about it, or fear about it, and how it would be perceived, especially in my profession. So I didn’t really tell anybody. I told my best friend, my manager, and I told my family.”
