Mark Ruffalo

Mark Ruffalo started in the late 1980s and spent close to a decade getting nowhere in particular. The break was theatre: Kenneth Lonergan's play This Is Our Youth in 1996, then Lonergan's film You Can Count on Me in 2000, where he plays a drifting younger brother turning up in his sister's life with no plan. Almost everything good he has done since is a variation on that man.

The quality is unfinishedness. Ruffalo mumbles, hesitates, changes direction mid-sentence and plays thinking rather than the results of thinking, which is why he is so effective as investigators: David Toschi in Zodiac, working a case that will not close, and Michael Rezendes in Spotlight, where the acting is mostly listening and taking notes. He has four Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor, for The Kids Are All Right, Foxcatcher, Spotlight and Poor Things, which ties a record.

He also took over Bruce Banner in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and made the part work by playing him as a man managing a chronic medical condition rather than a curse, which no previous version had tried. On television he won a Screen Actors Guild Award for playing a gay activist in the film of The Normal Heart and a Primetime Emmy for a lead role in a miniseries, playing identical twins. He was Tony-nominated for the 2006 Broadway revival of Awake and Sing!, a reminder that the film career is the second one and that the stage is where he learned to do this.