Mark Ruffalo was 33, married about a year, and his wife was pregnant with their first child. He had just finished a run on You Can Count on Me that put him on Hollywood’s radar for the first time, and he was in the final days of shooting The Last Castle with James Gandolfini and Robert Redford.

Then he woke up around 3 a.m. before a 4 a.m. call.

“I just had this crazy dream,” he told Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett on their SmartLess podcast. “It wasn’t like any other dream I’d 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........

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