Mark Ruffalo dreamt he had a brain tumour – and he actually did (Picture: Amy Sussman/Getty Images)
Mark Ruffalo was 33 when he had a bizarre nightmare about his health, which turned out to be real.
The 13 Going On 30 actor’s wife of 24 years Sunrise Coigney, now 51, was heavily pregnant and his career had just taken off when the 56-year-old had a very strange dream.
After he starred in You Can Count On Me, Mark was bagging big agents, and was midway through filming The Last Castle alongside Robert Redford and James Gandolfini when he made a terrifying discovery.
At 3am he woke up from what he describes as a ‘crazy dream’ which was nothing like any he’d ever experienced before.
The dream simply told him he had a brain tumour, and had to act immediately.
‘It was just like, “You have a brain tumour”,’ he recalled, speaking on a recent Smartless podcast episode.
‘It wasn’t even a voice, it was pure knowledge. Like, “You have a brain tumour and you have to deal with this immediately.”‘
The actor described the very ‘intense’ dream, after which he found a tumour ‘the size of a golf ball’ (Picture: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
His only physical symptom was an infection in his left ear, which turned out to be hosting a tumour the ‘size of a golf ball’ as he discovered on visiting the doctor the next day, and sheepishly explaining his dream.
To put his mind at rest, the doctor booked him in to have a scan that same day.
‘I could hear the doctors talking. She comes in and is kind of like a zombie, and she’s like, “You have a mass on your left ear the size of a golf ball. We don’t know what it is. We can’t tell until it’s had a biopsy.”‘
The Avengers star revealed how he didn’t tell his wife as she was wrapped up with birth plans, and gearing up for the arrival of their child.
He didn’t tell her until the night before he was having the tumour removed – and lucky he did give her some warning, as he ended up with a ‘big scar’ which looked like a quarter of a horse show.
Mark’s wife Sunrise Coigney was heavily pregnant at the time (Picture: Emma McIntyre/WireImage)
Thankfully, the tumor was benign, but Mark remembers feeling unease before learning this because of the intensity of the dream he had.
‘The dream was so intense, it was like, “You have a brain tumour, you have to deal with this immediately,”‘ he recalled again. ‘It had this sense of doom.’
When she did tell Sunrise, her reaction was priceless. ‘First she thought I was joking, then she just burst into tears and said, ‘”I always knew you were going to die young,”‘ remembered Mark, laughing.
The operation left him completely deaf in his left ear, but it could have been worse.
When the Poor Things actor woke up, the left hand side of his face was paralysed he couldn’t see out one eye.
‘They said to me I had a 20% chance of nicking my nerve and killing [the left side of his face] and a 70% chance of losing my hearing, which went.’
Luckily, his face went back to normal.
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That is spooky.