Keen Ruffalo’s Inheritance

He channels his dad’s charm but adds a swagger all his own on the refreshing YA series Sterling Point.

“It’s a bit absurd,” says Keen Ruffalo, “but I want to try everything.” The actor and star of Amazon Prime’s hit series Sterling Point is enduring a Los Angeles rite of passage — being simultaneously appalled and intoxicated by Erewhon, the city’s prohibitively expensive food-and-wellness emporium. Prior to this rudely hot August evening, Ruffalo, 25, had never stepped foot inside a location, despite having lived here for five years. A $26 glass jug of water gives him sticker shock, as does a small, similarly priced honeycomb. “What’s the overhead on raising bees?” he wonders aloud, inspecting a shelf of maple syrup. “I might be in the wrong industry.”

An organic blueberry unlocks a Proustian memory of the wild blueberry bushes of his upstate New York childhood, where Ruffalo was raised on a farm with his parents and two younger sisters. “My dad would put me on his shoulders and wander around the woods, just picking them and handing them up to me,” he says, and, upon sampling one, adds: “This is honestly perfect.” His dad, of course, is movie star Mark Ruffalo, from whom Keen inherited his errant brown hair and disarming screen presence. 

On Sterling Point, Keen Ruffalo plays rich Brooklyn teen Connor, the swaggering-yet-sweet twin of the more grounded Annie (Ella Rubin), who discovers that their late adoptive mother had a biological daughter and that all three siblings have inherited a resplendent island in Muskoka, Canada. The series, which earned a renewal two weeks after its August debut, continues the streaming giant’s kink for balmy YA content featuring dead moms and love triangles (see also: The Summer I Turned Pretty, Every Year After) but with sharper dialogue that recalls co-showrunners Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage’s former hit The O.C.

Among Sterling Point’s superb cast of relative newcomers, Ruffalo steals scenes simply by sauntering into them, a class clown dripped out in Margiela and Rick Owens. Series creator Megan Park (My Old Ass) encouraged improvisation, which yielded such breezy, meme-able moments as Connor’s bath scene where he’s making boobs out of bubbles (“every guy’s been there,” he assures me) or the agonized, “Dad, I need a new phone,” after he drops his straight into the tub. Ruffalo originally read with Rubin for the part of one of Annie’s romantic interests, Ellis (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie), but Park knew he was Connor as soon as she saw him with Rubin. “It was the resemblance between the two of them,” she says. “He was so funny; their banter was so natural that we never read another actor for the role of Connor.” Ruffalo laughs at the way it went down: “They were like, ‘We loved you guys as lovers, but now we want to see you as siblings.’”

The Sterling Point cast has praised Ruffalo in interviews for being among the first to reach out and start a group chat prior to filming. “I thought it was important to get to know each other,” he says. When asked if he was worried about being treated differently for having a famous father, he responds without hesitation: “It’s always something I’m worried about. Imposter syndrome is something I’ve been dealing with my entire life.” Nonetheless, he bonded easily with his castmates while filming in Toronto and the Muskoka Lakes area, enjoying picnics rather than partying. “I’ve had my fun,” says Ruffalo. “At this point in my life, I don’t really drink or anything. I just want to work.”

We head to the checkout counter with a haul of “natural” fruit rollups, tinned mussels, a double order of Korean short ribs, and those perfect blueberries for a total of $97. Ruffalo makes chitchat with a woman in line about her miniature greyhound and recommends to the cashier that she take a snowy walk in Central Park during her December trip to New York. Ruffalo can, in a blink, switch from playful to earnest. “He is quieter in real life than most people would expect,” says Park. Tearing into the fruit rollups at a table outside, he discusses the different acting techniques he has studied over the past six years — Stella Adler, Uta Hagen, Konstantin Stanislavski. Prior to the pandemic, Ruffalo says he never considered following in his dad’s footsteps. “I kind of viewed acting as like, Oh, this is why my dad is not home,” he says. “He was away working a lot and, yeah, of course he had to work. But I was, like, 5 and couldn’t grasp that.” A visit to the set of his dad’s 2013 movie Begin Again led to Ruffalo earning one wiseass line in the movie, but he so loathed seeing himself onscreen that to this day he calls it “the traumatic Begin Again incident.” (He is also mistakenly credited with a cameo in Thor: Ragnarok, but that was one of his younger sisters.)

Growing up in the Catskills, Ruffalo struggled with ADHD and dyslexia and didn’t learn to read until he was 11. “I still read so slowly,” he explains, adding that he relies on the Scriptation app to listen to scripts. He was often kicked out of class for being disruptive and preferred running barefoot in the woods and building forts with his father. He recalls how the two of them once accidentally poisoned themselves and his sisters by misidentifying edible mushrooms — “We were like, ‘No, it’s good,’ and my mom was like, ‘Absolutely not,’ and we got horrendously sick,” he says with a laugh. His mother, former model and boutique owner Sunrise Coigney, still teases them about it. 

Ruffalo eventually attended boarding school in Connecticut. “That was a wild one,” he says, laughing. “Learning right and wrong from a 14-year-old who’s a grade above you is Lord of the Flies–esque.” He turns up his inner forearms to reveal two wobbly stick-and-poke tattoos given to him by his roommate junior year. “My mom was so mad,” he says. “It’s funny until I have to show up to set 20 minutes before everyone else to cover them up.” He learned to build boats around this time and used the metalworking skills he honed at camps as a kid to make jewelry. “Master of none, though, you know?” he says, taking a drag from his Juul. Feeling “lost and depressed,” he says, he dropped out of design studies at Drexel University in his first semester, shortly before the COVID shutdown, and eventually decided to study acting at the HB Studio in New York and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. “At that point, I was not happy with myself, and being able to transform into different people was very appealing to me,” he adds. His parents were cautiously supportive. “My mom was very realistic. She laid it all out for me and was like, ‘Everybody catches shit,’” he recalls.

Ruffalo doesn’t flinch at the notion that his last name brings with it benefits and admits that he asked to work as a production assistant on some of his father’s TV projects, including the HBO crime drama Task and the quirky Mubi dramedy Hal & Harper, both of which led to cameos in the series. “I needed money, I have no other worldly skills, so yeah, I’d obviously be like, ‘Hey, Dad, can you please set me up for the job?’” he says.

His phone buzzes, a call from his manager, asking about an earlier audition for an independent film. “I think it went okay,” he tells him. “I made them laugh.” 

This summer, Ruffalo also appeared in the road comedy Nimrods as a 20-something who pranks his younger brother (Mason Thames) by convincing him that his band is opening for Green Day on New Year’s Eve (real-life front man Billie Joe Armstrong conceived of and co-produced the project). Ruffalo didn’t foresee this moment — the swirl of projects and publicity — arriving so soon. “I was like, All right, five to six years of small indie movies, supporting roles, hell yeah,” he says. On a few occasions, he asks to speak off the record. “I just realized that that was something I was allowed to do,” he says. “I’m a pretty anxious person. I’m getting a little bit more comfortable with interviews, but I was terrified of them at the start.”

He is visibly cautious only when the topic turns to the current controversy involving Mark, which began last month when the Spider-Man: Brand New Day star criticized the potential merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. In an August Instagram post, Mark emphasized the connection between Paramount Skydance, which is run by CEO David Ellison, and Oracle, the technology company co-founded by Ellison’s father, Larry, which has supplied software and security systems to the Israel Defense Forces. (Mark has been critical of Israel’s military conduct in Gaza, referring to it as a “genocide.”) In response, Paramount Skydance accused him of invoking “antisemitic tropes.” Mark denied the charge, calling it “appalling,” and over 100 Jewish artists, including Hannah Einbinder and Tony Kushner, signed an open letter supporting him.

When I ask if he has any concerns that the situation could impact his own career, Ruffalo takes a long pause before responding. “I love my dad, and I’m extremely proud of the person he is,” he says finally. “I think I’m going to leave it there.” Improbably, just then, his phone buzzes again, and the name “Dad” appears onscreen. He smiles and silences the call.