Mark Ruffalo says his face was paralyzed for a year after brain tumor surgery, still deaf in 1 ear

(Gray News) – Actor Mark Ruffalo is revealing more about the brain tumor he had more than 20 years ago, saying a vivid dream was his first warning sign.

On Monday, during an appearance on the “SmartLess” podcast with hosts Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett, Ruffalo recalled the health scare he had in 2001.

The actor said it was a dream that sent him to the doctor.

“It wasn’t like any other dream I’d ever had,” Ruffalo, 56, 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.’”

The “intense” dream and a general “sense of doom” sent him to the doctor for a CAT scan. He had no symptoms at the time, other than an ear infection.

“The nurse calls the doctor up; I could hear them talking in the other room. She comes in, she’s kinda like a zombie, and she says, ‘You have a mass behind your left ear the size of a golf ball, and we don’t know what it is. We can’t tell until it’s biopsied,’” Ruffalo recalled.

The tumor turned out to be benign, but he still needed surgery to have it removed.

Ruffalo also revealed on the podcast that he kept his diagnosis a secret until his then-pregnant wife, Sunrise Coigney, gave birth to their son Keen in a matter of days.

A week after the birth, and the night before his neurologist appointment, he told her.

“When I told Sunny about it, first she thought I was joking,” Ruffalo said. “And then she just burst into tears and said, ‘I always knew you were gonna die young.’”

The doctors warned Ruffalo that there was a 20% chance of “killing” the nerves on the left side of his face and a 70% chance of losing the hearing in his left ear because of the surgery.

“[I am] completely deaf in one ear, and when I woke up, the left side of my face was totally paralyzed,” Ruffalo said. “I couldn’t even close my eye. I was talking out the side of my mouth.”

The paralysis cleared after about a year, but his hearing loss remained.

Since then, he has seen Keen, now 22, grow into a young man. Ruffalo and his wife went on to welcome two more children — Bella Noche, now 18, and Odette, now 16.