How Mark Ruffalo's Spotlight Helped the Avengers: Endgame Team Perfect Smart Hulk

With a movie as technically challenging as Avengers: Endgame, the production team had to overcome [...]

With a movie as technically challenging as Avengers: Endgame, the production team had to overcome a lot of challenges in order to make the film work. But there's one aspect in the visual effects that managed to click together with ease, despite being one of the most visually complex aspects of the film — and it's all thanks to Mark Ruffalo, who appears in the movie as the drastically changed Smart Hulk. According to the visual effects team including Russell Earl and Dan DeLeeuw, they explained how Ruffalo's acclaimed role in Spotlight helped them crack the code for Smart Hulk.

Earl explained that they had thousands of references for Ruffalo as The Hulk, but it was a promotional interview for Spotlight that proved to do the trick.

"So we found this scene: it was an interview that he had done after the movie Spotlight, it was a serious thing, and so he animated it," Earl explained to ComicBook.com. "At that point we were pretty far along with Smart Hulk, so he could make this just Smart Hulk – or Professor Hulk – with just normal Ruffalo delivering this interview and we saw, we're like, "Oh my God, this is great", and we sent it down to these guys."

DeLeeuw added that Ruffalo really enjoyed the test footage when they sent it to him.

"You get it where you love it, and the design came in and it turned out, what it's like, and, Smart Hulk looked really handsome," DeLeeuw explained. "And then you show the studio and the directors and they like it. But I think you're not really done until you get the confidence of the actor to go along with it because it's something that the same thing we did with Josh shot of Thanos, where he really enjoyed the show."

He added, "You get to the point where they trust you with what their performance is going to be and they know that you can reproduce their performance, so they can just not have to overact or push through the motion capture or anything like that. You can just let them be them in their role and actually get it on the screen."

Fans can see Smart Hulk's big debut now as Avengers: Endgame is currently streaming on Disney+. Be sure to check out the rest of our interview with the visual effects team on ComicBook.com by clicking here.

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