The District of Muskoka in Ontario, Canada, is one of the most unique places Keen Ruffalo has ever been, and that’s not only because the JW Marriott there has North America’s only floating pickleball court.
“It’s their claim to fame,” Ruffalo says, of the hotel where he and his “Sterling Point” castmates lived last summer. “I’m very familiar with the JW up there. I think I’ve had everything on that menu at least three times.”
Muskoka served as both setting and character for “Sterling Point,” the new series which marks Ruffalo’s first big role.
“Sterling Point” is the first TV show from actor-turned-filmmaker Megan Park, whose debut film “The Fallout” took home the Grand Jury Prize at SXSW. Her second, the Aubrey Plaza and Maisy Stella-led “My Old Ass,” was produced by LuckyChap and picked up by Amazon MGM out of Sundance; both companies are involved again with “Sterling Point.”
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The coming-of-age series stars Annie and Connor, adopted twins raised by a single dad in New York. Their mother died when they were young and they never knew much about her family, until one day they learn that they’ve inherited an island in the Muskoka district from a grandfather they never knew. A desire to learn more about their family leads them north, where they begin to uncover family secrets and discover their own roots.
Ruffalo wasn’t initially familiar with Park’s previous films, mainly because he doesn’t watch too many movies.
“I don’t like watching stuff alone — I’ll only watch things when I’m with other people, because I’m a bit of a yapper,” he says.
Once he dove into her work, and read the scripts for “Sterling Point,” he joined the fan club.
“She’s really good at portraying that kind of young, just coming into the real world adolescent image that I think is harder to find nowadays,” Ruffalo says of Park. “It’s rare to find someone that actually understands what it is to be around that age and not hypersexualize it or turn it into something that it’s not. And I think she does that very well. I think she’s very aware of the human experience, especially around that age.”
Now out of that stage and into his mid-20s — as the oldest member of “Sterling Point’s” core cast, he was dubbed “unc” on the group chat — Ruffalo can still easily relate to Connor’s confusion.
“I was similar to most people around that age: just uncomfortable in your own skin and not knowing what’s next and just the whole everyone’s figuring it out,” he says.
Ruffalo is the oldest child of Mark Ruffalo and Sunrise Coigney; he and his sisters were raised outside of the Hollywood storm in Callicoon, N.Y., and the 25-year-old is now making his debut into the movie business. With a few roles in projects like “Hal & Harper” and his dad’s show “Task,” plus a Dior front row appearance at the brand’s L.A. show earlier this spring, he’s taking on his biggest project yet with “Sterling Point.”
Deciding to become an actor was an about-face for Ruffalo. When he was 12 he was visiting his dad on the set of the rom-com “Begin Again” and was asked if he’d be interested in being an extra. The experience of shooting the scene stands out less now than the memory of seeing it back.
“I went to the premiere with my dad and we were watching it and I lean over when my scene’s coming and I go, ‘Dad, do I look like that?’ He was like, ‘yeah,’” Ruffalo recalls. “I lean away and watch the rest of the scene, lean over: ‘Dad, do I sound like that?’ He goes ‘yeah.’ I go quiet again, lean back over and go ‘I don’t think I want to be an actor.’”
Instead, he pursued fashion design, an early passion of his. Growing up, his mother had a boutique called Sunny’s Callicoon Pop and Ruffalo was always stealing the jewelry out of the cases to play with. He started making his own pieces and made it one semester at Drexel University, with plans to study fashion, when the pandemic hit.
“During COVID, I dropped out of college and I didn’t have the environment to make jewelry at the time,” he says. “I was just doing nothing and hit that depression of ‘I’ve just been sitting here for months on end not doing anything that has any meaning.’ So I was like, what could I do? And I decided acting makes my dad so happy that I might as well see how I feel about it,” he adds. “And I kind of fell in love with the idea of being able to be these different people and give them a voice. I think that’s kind of where it all started for me.”
When he notified his parents of his newfound interest in acting, they were encouraging yet appropriately cautionary.
“They never pushed me or my sisters to pursue anything in particular. My dad was very serious about it — it’s his entire life. So he’s always like, ‘you’re going to kill it, you’re going to do great,’” Ruffalo says. “And then suddenly he’s extremely serious: ‘well, you’re going to have to study for a few years and then you’ll have to do a few plays and then finally maybe you’ll be allowed to start auditioning. You need to put in your dues. That’s what I did. You’ll starve. You’ll work as a bartender and you won’t work.’”
Ruffalo was fully on board, ready to settle into a long period of relentless auditioning and small background roles, and instead, five years later, an Amazon series came calling.
“I definitely did not expect it,” he says. “I don’t think my parents did either because my dad was like, ‘this is messed up.’”
Ruffalo was shooting a movie called “Nimrods,” a road-trip comedy about a struggling band with hopes of opening for Green Day, when he sent in his audition for “Sterling Point.” He and a few of the other “Nimrods” young actors were all auditioning for the show, in fact, each for the character of Ellis.
“My buddy, I love him, he watched my self-tape and he was like, ‘oh man, that’s an interesting way to do it. It doesn’t read like that at all in the script,’” Ruffalo says — not exactly the feedback he was hoping to receive. But as luck would have it, while he wasn’t right for Ellis he was just the person they wanted for Connor, and soon enough Ruffalo was off to Muskoka.
Ruffalo is living in L.A. now, which works well for the industry, but someday he’d like to move back to upstate New York, to a similar environment in which he was raised.
“I just appreciate the quietness of it and being in nature,” he says. “I think that’s really where my heart is.”
Until then, he’s eager to get back to auditioning, work with new people, and maybe even go back to school to study acting. Oh, and log some more time doing as his old man warned: “suffering, auditioning,” he says. “That’s obviously most of what the job is.”