Mark Ruffalo wasn’t interested at first. The way he saw it, “Zodiac” was just another true-crime mystery flick – a genre he wasn’t particularly keen on pursuing.
But then, the 39-year-old actor had a change of heart after seeing a revamped script. “Zodiac,” also starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr., opened Friday.
On second read, Ruffalo says, he suddenly saw the potential of Dave Toschi, the former San Francisco Police Department detective who became embroiled in the infamous Zodiac serial-murder case, which claimed four lives in the late ’60s and riveted the nation.
Although several suspects emerged, most notably Arthur Leigh Allen, who died in 1992, the case was never solved.
Director David Fincher and screenwriter Jamie Vanderbilt “breathed such depth and nuance and life and detail into Toschi,” says Ruffalo.
Toschi’s life was already loosely immortalized on film. Steve McQueen based his character on Toschi in the 1968 thriller “Bullitt”; Clint Eastwood modeled “Dirty Harry” after the veteran detective.
Ruffalo, who met Toschi, says he was intrigued by his innate “grace,” even later in the face of scandal. Accused of forging a letter that the Zodiac killer supposedly sent to the San Francisco Chronicle, Toschi had to defend his reputation and job. He was eventually cleared.
Ruffalo says Toschi, who now owns a Bay Area security firm, is “a total gentleman who’s been wounded” and remains haunted by the case.
“He handled it all with dignity even though he never fully recovered – his career was done,” Ruffalo says. “He had this sad, noble struggle against all the odds and it came at a great cost – a personal sacrifice.” The film is based on Robert Graysmith’s best-selling books “Zodiac” and “Zodiac Unmasked.” Graysmith, a Chronicle editorial cartoonist at the time, worked on trying to crack the case on his own time after Toschi was no longer on it.
The Toschi-Graysmith connection, Ruffalo says, is crucial.
“(Graysmith) became a way for Toschi to stay involved in the case even when he wasn’t a cop anymore,” Ruffalo says. In researching his role, Ruffalo also met Bryan Hartnell, who was only 20 when he survived a 1969 Zodiac assault that killed his girlfriend.
“I’d already read so much about the case – I had all the police reports, the pictures, the crime scene investigations,” Ruffalo says. “But to be standing there with a person who was actually the victim of this crime? It was intense.” Hartnell is now a successful lawyer, and married with two children.
The media circus around the Zodiac case only added to the weight, he says, and made the killer an unlikely celebrity.
Ruffalo hopes the film’s dangling threads impart a sense of the bigger picture.
“Even though Dave Toschi felt in his heart of hearts that Allen was the killer, he couldn’t just walk up to him,” Ruffalo says. “What does a world look like when you can’t solve a crime like this?
“People know they’re coming to see a movie about a killer who doesn’t get caught. But what gets them is that we live in a world where the guy could still be out there. That’s what haunts you.”
