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Mark Ruffalo recently recalled having to rescue Woody Harrelson from a bar fight in New Orleans when the pair were filming the first Now You See Me movie in 2012.
During a recent appearance on the Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast, which is hosted by former Cheers stars Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson, Mark Ruffalo — promoting his HBO series Task and his upcoming movie Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, which he stars in alongside Harrelson — recalled the nearly “disastrously wrong” situation in The Big Easy.
Production on Now You See Me took place in New Orleans between January and March 2012, which overlaps with Mardi Gras, leading the production to use the chaos of the famous festival for their film. Now You See Me since spawned a franchise, with the third movie releasing on November 14.
Mark Ruffalo recalls rescuing Woody Harrelson from a bar fight in New Orleans while filming Now You See Me in 2012
“We were shooting ‘Now You See Me’ in New Orleans, completely on the streets. Totally wild. Capturing stuff on a long lens, getting dragged into bars during the middle of a scene, like in the middle of Mardi Gras,” the Oscar-nominated actor recalled about Harrelson, his fellow Academy Award nominee.
“A woman came up to [Woody] and she said, ‘Oh my God, I love you so much,’” Ruffalo said. “Woody put his hand on her arm and he said, ‘Oh, thank you. Thank you, darling.’ And this guy comes over and he pushes her outta the way, and he shoves Woody. Bad. Because Woody’s first response is not ‘shove someone back,’ but ‘immediately punch them in the face.’ Which is the right thing to do, by the way. It’s the absolute right thing to do. But then a whole melee broke out in this bar. I was in the middle of it and it was turning into a— it was getting to become a whole thing… And I grabbed [Woody].”
“I grabbed [Woody] and I pulled him out,” he continued. “Because I was like, ‘This could be fun, but it also just could go so disastrously wrong because you and I might be able to handle ourselves but the rest of the folks we were with… I don’t think so.”
In addition to Harrelson and Ruffalo, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t also features returning stars Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Dave Franco, and Morgan Freeman, alongside new cast members Justice Smith, Dominic Sessa, Ariana Greenblatt, and Rosamund Pike.