Even Robert Downey Jr. thinks Mark Ruffalo is 'bangable'

"You look pretty bangable to me, in case you were wondering."

True friends remind each other that they are bangable.

Robert Downey Jr. gave his Marvel costar Mark Ruffalo that reassurance in Variety's first "Actors on Actors" of the season, where the two discussed their respective roles in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer and Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things.

The comment came after Downey Jr. called Ruffalo's nude sex scene in Poor Things the "ultimate risk" for an actor.

"I was like, 'Do I have to?'" Ruffalo said of filming the scene. "All I can hear is, 'Nobody wants to see your old a-- anymore. Maybe you shouldn’t be doing movies like that anymore.' I mean, it’s my least favorite part of it, but I also saw it as an extension of the physical comedy that we were already finding. So it was just another way to tell the story."

Downey Jr. replied, "I just want to say this, too, because knowing you forever, on one of these Avengers movies, you take off your shirt, and you were in really good shape. And the director was like, 'We got it.' You’re like, 'Can I please stop dieting and working out now?'"

"There is no one I’ve ever come across who is more anxious to not be vain past the point where it is necessary to achieve an end for their work," Downey Jr. added.

"Was that a compliment?" Ruffalo asked.

"It’s a huge compliment," Downey Jr. said. "But I’ve got to say, you look pretty bangable to me, in case you were wondering."

"Thanks, man," Ruffalo said, adding that he wore an "a-- pad" for the role. Lanthimos "really wanted the silhouette," he said. "The big a-- pads, the leg pads, the thigh pads, the calf pads, those were all playing. So when you look at that and you’re like, “Wow, he looks great” — now you know, I was just wearing what the Avengers wear, but underneath my clothes."

Elsewhere, the actors marveled over their Marvel runs — and admitted that even they didn't always understand the lines they had to learn for the superhero flicks as their "science bros" characters. "We didn’t know what that was, what that meant," Ruffalo said of some of the jargon.

"It’d be really hard to dig in," Downey Jr. agreed. "I mean, we would just drive each other insane on set going, why can’t I retain this?"

Ruffalo plays Bruce Banner/The Hulk opposite Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark/Iron Man in the MCU. Marvel president Kevin Feige recently revealed that there are no plans to resurrect Downey Jr.'s superhero, who died in 2019's Avengers: Endgame, despite recent reports suggesting otherwise.

Watch Downey Jr. and Ruffalo's interview in full above.

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