It is not often that Mark Ruffalo gives the nod to a TV series.
In fact, "I Know This Much Is True", which is based on Wally Lamb’s 1998 novel of the same title, was initially pitched as a movie.
And Lamb had his eye on Ruffalo for the identical twin roles of Dominic and Thomas Birdsey.
When introductions were made via a shared literary agent - and after Ruffalo read the book - the pitch evolved into a six-part mini-series as the story mandated that time frame.
The “Spotlight” star also shares the executive producer credits on this project.
On connecting to the story of twin brothers, one of whom is a paranoid schizophrenic, he said: “Well, I’m a descendant of Italian immigrants. My people came over, they were so poor, and they came to make a new life here in America.
"My grandfather started a house painting business, they were working class people hellbent on leaving their Italian heritage behind and becoming Americans and that’s what they did. And family was everything.
“And family secrets stayed in the family and you know, there was mental illness, these great family dramas, I had my brother, who was what we call an ‘Italian twin’ we were born less than a year apart from each other, and the way we were raised was that family is everything.
"So your family sees everything – the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. And I just related to this story, it felt like ‘goddamn, these are the people I know, these are the people I grew up with. This is the class that I knew.’
"Nobody tells stories about these people but these are essentially who we are as Americans, or an aspect of America. So it was all of those things and the challenge of playing twins.”
And it was no easy feat despite Ruffalo’s wealth of experience in front of and behind the camera.
Mark Ruffalo as Dominic in M-Net’s psychological drama, “I Know This Much Is True”.
Picture: Supplied
Thomas is schizophrenic and overweight. His attempt to chop off his hand in a public library triggers a chain of events with far-reaching consequences that unearth family secrets, pent up frustrations and anger as well as sacrifice.
Meanwhile, Dominic, a painter and protective brother, does his best to ensure his brother is released from a psychiatric prison. He is a mess, his relationship with his current girlfriend is on the rocks and his past with his ex-wife still shadows his present.
Ruffalo admitted: “I was scared sh*****s. I mean, I jumped into it with all kinds of bravado in my late 40s but, by the time I was 52, I had lost my confidence as an actor, as a man, everything, and so this was becoming a reality as I was becoming more and more fearful of being able to pull it off.”
He continued: “I couldn’t have asked for a better partner going into this than Derek (Cianfrance, director and co-writer). He is someone who wants that vulnerability and he was like, ‘OK, you’re feeling that way?
"Well, just be that and we’ll shoot that and it’ll be great. Bring whatever you are experiencing to our work and we’ll shoot that. And we’ll start there and maybe something else will happen.’ And that’s basically what happened every day. And we just kept sweeping in the reality of the present moment always.
“And you know if you can do that and you have someone who has a good eye like Derek to guide you inside of that you can’t fall – you are the mountain, you’re not climbing it, you suddenly become it. So everything that I was feeling – the uncertainty, the feeling of being a failure, the loss of confidence – that’s everything that those two people were experiencing as well.
Ruffalo took a six-week break to physically prepare for his role as Thomas, which felt very strange.
“Yes, I was in a kind of limbo. I had finished Dominick and I had this whole other daunting journey ahead of me, which I had been just so anxious about throughout the entire time I was shooting Dominick and there it was,” he admitted.
Aside from looking the part, which required him to be eating all the time, he had to get the psyche of his character right.
He added: "Once I’d spent time with my technical consultant, who is a person living with paranoid schizophrenia, I watched hundreds, maybe a thousand hours, of people speaking about it: interviews with people speaking about it, people talking about their daily lives, the ways different medication affected them.
"And I just took all of this stuff in. But ultimately schizophrenia is not a character – it’s an impediment to somebody who already is a character. And finding who Thomas was, was paramount.
“I Know This Much Is True” airs on M-Net (DStv channel 101) on Thursday at 10pm. It's also available on Showmax.