Mark Ruffalo waited until after his wife gave birth to tell her he had a brain tumor: ‘I just couldn’t’

Mark Ruffalo said he found out he had a brain tumor more than 20 years ago when his wife was nine months pregnant with their first child. 

"I had a brain tumor after the success of ‘You Can Count on Me,’" the 56-year-old actor told Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett on the "Smartless" podcast Monday. "It’s the craziest thing. I was actually shooting ‘The Last Castle’ with [James] Gandolfini and Robert Redford and I had about a week left on that." 

The "13 Going on 30" actor said he had a 4 a.m. call to be on set and "I woke up probably around three and I just had this crazy dream, you know, it wasn’t like any other dream I ever had. 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." 

He said he had no symptoms other than an ear infection, but he decided to go to the cast doctor anyway and told her, ‘Listen, this is going to sound crazy, but I had this dream last night that I have a brain tumor’ and she said, ‘That is crazy, but there’s no reason you should have to worry about it. I’ll order you a CAT scan, and we’ll go right after work today, and we’ll show how crazy you are." 

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Mark Ruffalo waited until Sunrise Coigney gave birth to their first child to tell her he had a brain tumor.  (Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)

Ruffalo went to the neurologist’s office to read the scan later, and "the nurse calls the doctor out, and I could hear them talking in the other room, and she just comes in, and she’s 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.’"

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He said he didn’t want to tell his wife, Sunrise, because "she had the birth plan, she did the yoga, she had the doula, we had a hot tub ordered. This is like her wedding, you know, man? This is like her christening, her quinceañera, and I was just like, ‘I can’t.’ She’s already like, ‘Oh God, him again? I mean, does everything gotta be about him?’ So, I just couldn’t."

Mark Ruffalo with wife Sunrise Coigney and son Keen in 2015.  (Jim Spellman/WireImage)

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Ruffalo said a week after their baby was born — son Keen, now 22 — he had to meet with the neurologist to decide what he was going to do. 

"I hadn’t told her until the night before," he said of his wife. 

When he finally told Coigney about the tumor, "at first she thought I was joking, and then she just burst into tears and said, ‘I always knew you were going to die young!’" 

The brain tumor turned out to be benign, but it left him "totally" deaf in one ear.

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Mark Ruffalo said he was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor when he was 33.  (Rodin Eckenroth/WireImage)

"And when I woke up, the left side of my face was totally paralyzed. Like I couldn’t even close my eye and was talking out of the side of my mouth," he explained, adding that the doctors had told him he had a "20% chance of nicking the nerve on the left side of my face and killing it and then I had 70% chance of losing my hearing, which went."

He said at that point he spoke to a higher power, saying, "‘OK, I don’t really believe in you, but take my hearing, let me keep the face and let me be the father to these kids." 

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Ruffalo and Coigney also share Bella, 18, and Odette, 16.