She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is already amassing a strong fanbase following the release of its first two episodes on Disney Plus. Part of its winning formula is the “two Hulks are better than one” the show’s writing team has employed in the series onset. While his lawyerly cousin, Jennifer, has kept to the spotlight, She-Hulk has brought The Hulk back to the forefront of the MCU for the first time since Avengers: Infinity. And Mark Ruffalo says he’s more than willing to stick around for the time being.
According to Ruffalo, there’s still plenty to explore in the character’s “missing years” during The Blip. Especially the process by which he managed to keep his Bruce Banner persona dominant while sharing The Hulk’s super-powered strength. Although his journey was touched upon in the first episode of She-Hulk, Ruffalo believes that there are more stories to be told about his recovery process. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, he says Hulk’s story is far from being fully told.
“I think this is a good entry into that time period, that two years between Infinity War and what happened in Endgame — there’s a gap where we don’t know what happened to him and all of a sudden he’s a professor and he is no longer Banner after he couldn’t turn into the Hulk. I love how we start to open up that world, but I think there’s almost a standalone story to be told for just those two years. How did we go from a Banner who couldn’t turn into the Hulk anymore to all of a sudden this fully integrated version? This is a really nice way to introduce that story, but I also feel like it doesn’t satisfy exactly what happened in that time period. I think there’s a lot more to say about it.”
It certainly seems like the MCU isn’t finished with the character, given the plot twist She-Hulk just dropped in episode two. For now, it seems that The Hulk may race into the future rather than the past. But that’s fine with Ruffalo. “Five years from now, it could morph into anything, whatever’s pertinent at the time,” Ruffalo told EW. “I almost see him going back to ‘Berserker Hulk’ or ‘World War Hulk.’ It could go anywhere. That’s the exciting part — I’ve played five different versions from beginning to now, and that’s kept it interesting for me, and I hope interesting for other people.”