Mark Ruffalo has told how a "crazy dream" about having a brain tumour helped him be diagnosed.
The Avengers star was diagnosed with a brain tumour over 20 years ago - and puts his diagnosis down to a dream that spurred him on to go to the doctor.
"I woke up probably around three (am) and I just had this crazy dream," he told Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett on the Smartless podcast on Monday.
"It wasn’t like any other dream I ever had. It was just like, ‘You have a brain tumour.’ It wasn’t even a voice. It was just pure knowledge: ‘You have a brain tumour, and you have to deal with it immediately.'"
He visited the doctor the next day and she booked him for a scan.
"I could hear the doctors talking," he recalled. "She comes in and is kind of like a zombie, and she’s like, “You have a mass on your left ear the size of a golf ball. We don’t know what it is. We can’t tell until it’s had a biopsy.”‘
He didn't initially tell his wife Sunrise about the diagnosis because she was about to give birth to their first child. In fact, he only revealed what was happening the night before he was due to go into surgery.
"First she thought I was joking, then she just burst into tears and said, 'I always knew you were going to die young,'" he said.
Luckily the tumour was removed and found to be benign. The operation left Mark, now 56, deaf in his left ear.