I Know This Much Is True: how Mark Ruffalo played two very different twins in HBO drama and why he was so keen to adapt the book to screens
- Ruffalo plays identical twin brothers – one suffering from paranoid schizophrenia – in gruelling duel role that required significant weight change
- Director Derek Cianfrance deliberately worked Ruffalo up by making him do push-ups before takes, and encouraging his negativity towards a supporting actor
Hollywood began circling I Know This Much Is True before it was even published in the summer of 1998. Despite its Tolstoy-esque length and often grim subject matter, Wally Lamb’s novel about identical twin brothers became a massive bestseller, boosted by what was then the ultimate endorsement: Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club.
Twentieth Century Fox gobbled up the movie rights for a reported seven-figure sum. Big-name talent including Matt Damon, Jonathan Demme and Jim Sheridan were attached to the project along the way, and numerous screenwriters attempted to tame the 900-plus-page book, which spans from the 1920s to the 1990s and includes a story within a story about the brothers’ Sicilian grandfather. But the adaptation languished in development hell.
“I had written an unreasonably long story and nobody could quite figure out how to fit something that large into a two-hour box,” Lamb says.
The author longed to bring his story to a wider audience but grew weary of empty overtures from the industry. “I thought, OK, this is just what happens when Hollywood starts flirting with you, like the cute girl who says, ‘I’m going to go to the prom with you’ but it never happens.”
Lamb can finally buy that corsage: part one of I Know This Much Is True is now showing on HBO, thanks in large part to star and executive producer Mark Ruffalo, who helped rescue the project from development limbo. The six-part series is written and directed by Derek Cianfrance.
It charts the saga of Dominick and Thomas Birdsey (both played by Ruffalo), who are raised in a tense and sometimes violent household in a working-class town in the US state of Connecticut by their mother (Melissa Leo) and stepfather (John Procaccino). The identity of their biological father is a gnawing mystery.