'The Avengers': As the Hulk, Mark Ruffalo is all the rage - New York Daily News

Marvel

Ruffalo, as the Incredible Hulk, thanks to CGI and performance-capture technology

You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.

Actually, you would: Mark Ruffalo makes for an incredible Hulk in “The Avengers.”

The 44-year-old actor says he can relate to the rage consuming his character, Dr. Bruce Banner, in the superhero blockbuster opening Friday - despite his zen-like calm while talking to a reporter at the posh Beverly Hills Four Seasons hotel.

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“You should have seen me in my 20s, man,” Ruffalo says of a decade spent largely traveling between fruitless auditions. “I was the poster definition of an angry young man with a persecution complex.

“I’ve gotten a lot of gifts and I have a lot to be thankful for, so I don’t wear my anger - I’m much cooler. But there was a time if you came into my apartment, there were pictures and posters hanging in very odd places where they were covering fist-holes through walls.

“Glasses that had been thrown through, coffee mugs, books, whatever I could get a hold of as I was struggling as a young actor, suffering through imagined or real slights from other people’s hands,” he says, now able to grin through the memories. “So it wasn’t too hard to revisit those places.”

It’s hard to reconcile that with his current reputation as one of the nice guys in Hollywood. Even “Avengers” co-star Samuel L. Jackson told the News, “He’s just everybody's little cuddly bear. Everyone loves hugging on Mark.”

On screen, however, Ruffalo can rampage with the best of them.

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He has his work cut out for him as the third actor that moviegoers have had to accept as Banner (whose experiments with gamma radiation turn him into the world’s most misunderstood super hero) in less than a decade.

Eric Bana walked around in ripped pants in 2003’s “Hulk” and Ed Norton put on the green contacts for 2008’s “The Incredible Hulk.”

“I sort of see it as the next step in what has already come before by two great actors who I totally admire and thoroughly enjoyed in what they did with this,” says Ruffalo.

This time around, writer/director Joss Whedon was looking to cast an actor that could channel the sadness of Bill Bixby from the TV version of “The Incredible Hulk” that made Whedon’s generation tear up in the late ’70s.

As “The Avengers” opens, an older, wearier Banner is hiding among lepers in Calcutta, avoiding the authorities who seek to capture the Hulk, when he’s tracked down by the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). He’s asked to join the titular group of heroes as they seek to save the planet from a major threat.