Mark Ruffalo turned a New York voting-rights rally into a superhero-style warning for President Donald Trump, telling supporters he was ready to “Hulk out” over efforts to tighten mail-in ballot rules before the midterms.
Ruffalo, 58, used the “Hands Off Our Vote” stage Sunday to merge his Marvel fame with a midterm message about Republicans blocking Democrats from regaining power.
Republicans, Ruffalo argued, would “try and stop us from taking our country back, and we’re not going to let ‘em.”
“Trump, we’re not letting ya,” he added, before leading the crowd in chants of “hands off!”
Ruffalo then pushed the event’s name into R-rated territory.
“Hands off our f—ing vote,” he declared, before screaming and adding, “I’m going to Hulk out! You won’t like me when I’m angry!”
The actor also reminded the room that his Marvel run was not over.
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“They … thought I was out for the count. I’m still here. I’m still playing the Hulk,” Ruffalo told the crowd, drawing cheers.
His Bruce Banner resume dates back to 2012 and most recently includes “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” released in July.
After the Hulk bits, Ruffalo turned to what he described as the danger of Republicans losing the vote count and still refusing the result.
Ruffalo said “we all know that we’re going to kick their asses,” referring to Republicans.
“But we all know they’re going to steal it,” Ruffalo continued. “They’re going to do everything in their power, and it isn’t going to be over the night we all win. It’s going to take all of us after that, staying together, remaining hopeful, remaining strong.”
The warning cut against Ruffalo’s posture in 2020, when Trump claimed Republican leads were “magically” disappearing overnight.
Back then, Ruffalo told Trump the unfinished count was about pandemic-era mail-in and absentee ballots, not anything strange.
“We haven’t finished counting the votes. Be patient. There are millions of uncounted ballots. Let the process happen. We have been doing this a long time,” Ruffalo wrote at the time.
It’s not strange. It’s mail in Ballots and Absentee ballots during a pandemic. We haven’t finished counting the votes. Be patient. There are millions of uncounted ballots. Let the process happen. We have been doing this a long time. #CountEveryVote
— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) November 4, 2020
Sunday’s version of Ruffalo put election security and Elon Musk into the same warning about threats voters might miss.
Republicans and Trump were trying to “suppress and disrupt the vote,” Ruffalo claimed, before warning that citizens “need to be on guard for what we may not see coming.”
“That’s the cybersecurity of these elections. And while I’m not an expert, I’ve been talking to experts. And the one thing I’ve heard repeatedly is that there is a vulnerability of the votes when they’re transferred from the polling places to the county headquarters and then to the states.”
To counter that risk, Ruffalo called for polling sites and county offices to preserve their own vote totals before sending results farther up the system.
Ruffalo moved from election process to Trump himself with a profanity-heavy broadside.
“We gotta get this dumbass, fool-ass, tired-ass, lame-ass, duck-ass out of office. We got to make him a lame duck! We have to stop his policies now. Another two years of this, and who knows what he’ll be doing? He’s calling to throw Democrats out of the country. And he means it!” Ruffalo continued.
In Ruffalo’s telling, Trump’s alleged foolishness did not make him harmless.
Ruffalo has long used his celebrity for political causes, including support for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the 2016 and 2020 presidential races, criticism of Israel’s military actions in Gaza and pressure on governments over climate change.
In Hollywood, Ruffalo has recently been fighting the Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery merger, warning that the deal could hurt creative freedom.
His merger criticism has also targeted Paramount chief executive David Ellison, whose father is Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
Ruffalo accused the Ellison family of complicity in the “genocide” of Palestinians, saying it was “built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”
He also shared a video of Safra Catz, Oracle’s executive vice-chair and a Paramount board member, discussing technologies used after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, pointing to the company’s ties to the Israeli military.
Paramount answered by accusing Ruffalo of invoking antisemitic tropes, an accusation he denied while defending his criticism of the merger and Oracle’s business ties to Israel.
More than 170 Jewish artists, academics and public figures later signed an open letter backing Ruffalo and warning against efforts to silence criticism of Israel or the merger.
George Clooney weighed in for Ruffalo in September, defending his right to criticize the deal while raising his own worries about consolidation in entertainment.
“I worry when a big company swallows up another company,” Clooney said. “I always worry whenever big companies are consolidating because it means a lot of people are going to lose their jobs.”
Clooney said he supported Ruffalo’s “ability to speak freely” and rejected the idea of banning speech.
“I believe in free speech even when I completely disagree with it,” Clooney said. “That’s important, right? In fact, it’s part of how a democracy works.”