Mark Ruffalo wants you to remember that ‘every petty dictator…they always lose’ in the end

By Francesca Street, CNN

London (CNN) — In “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho’s new movie, “Mickey 17,” Mark Ruffalo plays a villainous politician whose tyrannical actions threaten the human race.

Speaking at the movie’s world premiere last Thursday, Ruffalo called his character “an amalgamation of every petty dictator that we’ve seen over the last, you know, century, all rolled into one.”

“Add a little bit of, you know, Christian nationalist in there or religious zealot in there, and you have Kenneth Marshall,” he told CNN.

The character and the storyline may also feel “kind of prophetic” in the current political climate, added Ruffalo. The movie was filmed back in 2022, but is being released in cinemas on February 28 in South Korea and worldwide on March 7, by Warner Bros. Pictures. (CNN and Warner Bros. Pictures share the same parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery)

Ruffalo’s Kevin Marshall is the antagonist of the off-the-wall, sci-fi dark comedy, which sees Robert Pattinson’s protagonist Mickey Barnes sign up as an “expendable” — a crew member designed to die and be reborn again as needed — on a space mission. In an unexpected turn of events, two versions of Mickey, both played by Pattinson, end up existing at once, and must team up to save the day.

Ruffalo’s self-centered former congressman and his Machivellian wife, played by Toni Collette, are also on board for the ride, hoping to use the space mission for their own, self-aggrandizing means.

‘They all end the same way’

For Ruffalo, playing against type as “the most ridiculous, insane villain” was “a lot of fun.”

But as he drew upon a range of real world despots to form the character, Ruffalo found himself considering how: “They all end the same way.”

“I mean, it might be brutal on the way to getting there, but all of these guys end the same way. It’s not sustainable,” Ruffalo told CNN on the red carpet, in London’s Leicester Square. “And I think that’s kind of one of the nicer things about the movie, is that, in the end, the people always win.

It just takes some time and some suffering — horrible, you know, terrible things. But we gotta remember that we always win and they always lose.”

“They’re too selfish, they’re too self centered, they’re too arrogant, they’re too stupid, they’re too insane for them to triumph,” added Ruffalo.

Part of what drew the actor — who is also known for his activism — to Bong’s approach to the story is “it really honors the people…this kind of ground up power.”

Of course, the beauty of movies is people can take “whatever you want to take from it,” Ruffalo conceded.

But “that’s the message I take from it,” he explained.

Collette agreed that viewers will not “be able to stop themselves from seeing the correlation” between “Mickey 17“‘s fictional characters and potential real-life counterparts.

Collette told CNN that while the cast were “certainly aware” of political parallels during filming three year ago, since then “things have escalated, so I think it’s probably even more apt now, at the time of release.”

Costar Steven Yuen said he was less focused on the political theme — which remains just one strand of a multi-layered, ambitiously-cross-genre movie — and more on fulfilling Bong’s creative vision.

“I think it was more we were trying to service this kind of wild, deep dive into a creative well that we didn’t know what we were fishing out, you know, with Bong at the helm,” is how Yuen put it to CNN. “We were just following his lead.”

‘Wild, deep dive’

“Mickey 17” is the follow-up to South Korean filmmaker’s 2019 hit “Parasite,” which won best picture, best director, and best original screenplay at the 2020 Academy Awards.

The new film shares a zaniness with “Parasite,” and like the earlier film mixes the macabre with the comedic. CNN screened the film, and the sci-fi setting and cloning sub-plot feel like a means to create a socio-political satire, not dissimilar from the generally more grounded “Parasite.”

Bong — accompanied at the “Mickey 17” premiere by his interpreter, Sharon Choi — said that “on the outside, ‘Parasite’ and this film appear like very different movies, but they both ask a question about the human condition and what it means to live a truly human life, and ‘Mickey’ provides the answer to that question.”

The director also told CNN he pictured star Pattinson as the lead, “even from the screenwriting stage.”

As for Pattinson, it took him a little while to figure out the knack of playing two versions of the same character.

“But it was kind of fun. I prefer it to working with other actors,” he told CNN at the premiere.

Still, if he ever got the chance to interact with himself in the real world, Pattinson joked he would be “so bored.”

When quizzed about the timeliness of the movie’s political themes, Bong responded more ambiguously than some of his stars.

“It is hard to not say or say that I was conscious or not conscious of that while making this film,” Bong told CNN.

“This is just sci-fi movie,” he added, chuckling. “Enjoy the fantasy.”

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