Mark Ruffalo's startling premonition: How a dream revealed his brain tumor during The Last Castle filming

Mark Ruffalo might have second sight.

The Spotlight star had a brain tumor around 2001 — and he discovered his condition in a dream. In an interview on SmartLess, Ruffalo discussed his bizarre premonition, which occurred while he was working on The Last Castle, while his wife Sunrise Coigney was pregnant.

“I had one of those 4 a.m. calls, and I woke up probably around 3, and I just had this crazy dream. It wasn’t like any other dream I had had,” Ruffalo said. “It was just like ‘You have a brain tumor.’ It wasn’t even a voice, it was just pure knowledge: ‘You have a brain tumor, and you have to deal with it immediately.’”

Ruffalo brought his dream to the attention of the on-set doctor. “I said, ‘Listen, this is gonna sound crazy, but I had this dream last night that I have a brain tumor,’” Ruffalo explained. “And she said, ‘That is crazy, but there’s no reason that you should have to worry about it, I’ll order you a CAT scan and we’ll go right after work today and we’ll show how crazy you are.’”

The actor said that he went to get a CAT scan that same day, and the medical team told him, “You have a mass behind your left ear the size of a golf ball, and yeah, we don’t know what it is, we can’t tell until it’s biopsied.”

Ruffalo went on to explain that he withheld his diagnosis from his wife until after the birth of their son. “I was just like, I can’t. She’s already like, ‘Oh god, him again? Does everything gotta be about him?’” he said. “So I just couldn’t. And like a week after the baby I had to go in and meet the neurologist and decide what I was gonna do. I hadn’t told her until the night before.”

The actor’s wife had an understandably extreme response to the news. “When I told Sunny about it, first she thought I was joking, and she just burst into tears and said, ‘I always knew you were gonna die young!’” he said, laughing. “If you wrote it in a script, it’d be too much.”

Ruffalo also said that after the benign tumor was removed, he went completely deaf in his left ear. “They said I had a 20% chance of nicking my nerve on the left side of my face and killing it, and then I had 70% chance of losing my hearing, which went,” he said. He remembered thinking, “Take my hearing, let me keep the face, and just let me be the father of this kid.”

You can listen to the full SmartLess interview above.

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