Hulking-out faces, ranked

Playing Marvel’s Hulk (or a Hulk-like) requires fearlessness. While budget constraints demand a decent amount of time spent walking and talking as humanoid Bruce Banner or Jennifer Walters or, most recently, Thaddeus Ross in Captain America: Brave New World, at some point, the gamma radiation kicks in and the snarling begins. 

No actor can look “movie-star good” as rage boils their skin into a green (or red!) man-beast. A Hulk actor must gnash their teeth, flare their nostrils, and see their eyes momentarily bulge as they expand anywhere from 50% to 80% in size. Subtlety is not an option. But for thespians who crave the physical — and those of us viewers who love silly faces — the Hulk is a gift.

As technology has advanced, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe plots have thickened, so too has the art of hulking out. To appreciate how the legacy of Hulk acting has mutated over the years, here’s a look at the many live-action incarnations of Hulk, ranked on how hard they go.

11. Avengers: Endgame Hulk

Mark Ruffalo has played Bruce Banner/Hulk for 13 years (and is expected to again in future Avengers movies). But no two Hulk performances have been the same, so I feel inclined to honor each of his bigger outings on this list. At the bottom is Avengers: Endgame, a quality saga-ender that finds Bruce at his most Zen. Even in his Hulk state, he is under control, earning him the nickname Professor Hulk. This is great news for his colleagues and terrible news for those of us who want him to be a barely controllable smashing machine. The only real moment of hulking out is when Bruce time travels to the Battle of New York and does his best The Avengers Hulk impression — half-heartedly!

10. Hulk (2003) Hulk

While Eric Bana gets all the credit for leading the first theatrical Hulk movie, credit where credit is due: When it comes to providing reference footage for animators, director Ang Lee himself did the hard work! Lee, hoping to cut down on the amount of time it would take to explain how Hulk should be raging out in various scenes, slipped on the ping-pong-ball-dabbled motion-capture suit to act out the performance he envisioned in his head. Somehow, Lee did not earn an Academy Award for his work on Hulk (but did two years later for Brokeback Mountain). 

Slotting in Lee’s Hulk at No. 10 is by no means a knock on his hulking out — there just isn’t much of it. The Taiwanese filmmaker saw Hulk as a tragic figure, and pushed Industrial Light & Magic’s VFX team to deliver a more subdued, teary-eyed version of the Marvel character, akin to King Kong. So even when he’s stomping through the streets of San Francisco, he looks a bit more… confused monkey than Hulk.

9. Avengers: Infinity War Hulk

Ruffalo does not get a ton of time to hulk out in the two-hour-and-30-minute prelude to Avengers: Endgame. In fact, Hulk gets cucked pretty hard by Thanos in the opening minutes of the movie. This is about as much energy as he can summon before getting his own head smashed into Thor’s spaceship and whisked away via the bifrost. 

8. Thor: Ragnarok Hulk

Not so much hulking out as Maximus in Gladiator — but we’re getting closer to the good stuff.

7. She-Hulk She-Hulk

The joke of She-Hulk is that Tatiana Maslany’s Jennifer Walters is pretty well adjusted, even in Hulk form. She’s a lawyer, but green! Luckily, in the show’s premiere episode, a training sesh with her cousin Bruce Banner gives her the chance to transform and hulk out. Later on, a number of annoying men threaten to enrage her, but she mostly plays it cool. (Our loss.)

6. She-Hulk HulkKing

Actor Jon Bass knew the assignment. We don’t see much of his transformed villain HulkKing in She-Hulk, but when we do, we get a classic bit of hulking out with a comedic twist like it’s The Mask. 

5. The Incredible Hulk Hulk

In behind-the-scenes clips from The Incredible Hulk, actor Edward Norton made clear that the reason he signed up for the Marvel movie was to play Hulk. Not Bruce Banner — Hulk. If there wasn’t a way for him to breathe life into the eventual animated husk of on-screen Hulk, he didn’t want to do it. Marvel complied. Norton apparently spent hours with his face painted fluorescent green, hulking out inside a 360 camera rig so that his mouth-growling would be Hulk’s mouth-growling.

Based on critical reception, having an Oscar winner act out Hulk wasn’t the secret sauce to making a great Hulk movie. But I will stand up for Norton’s hulking out: There is soul there. The 2008 iteration of Hulk looks sweaty, craggy, and frankly uncomfortable in its body. Norton, under CG makeup, looks like he’s passing the biggest kidney stone of his life. That’s truth, baby.

4. Captain America: Brave New World Red Hulk

An amendment to the opening of this list: Playing the Hulk takes fearlessness or a boatload of cash. When asked if he felt silly playing Red Hulk in Captain America: Brave New World, Harrison Ford basically said… yeah. “But that’s what the money’s for.” 

Ford, by all accounts, still showed up to set and put on the motion-capture suit in order to imbue Red Hulk with his DNA. How much of the 82-year-old actor is actually hulking out on screen may be an eternal mystery, but one objective fact is that in the year 2025, visual effects artists can make a Hulk look like their human counterpart. Red Hulk is Hulkisson Ford. I imagine after doing five decades’ worth of Star Wars-related interviews, the rage was pretty natural.

3. The Incredible Hulk Hulk

As I reflected on the history of live-action hulking out, I could not help but appreciate the simple beauty of Lou Ferrigno in the Incredible Hulk TV series, a performance up there with Haruo Nakajima as the man in the Godzilla suit. It wasn’t as simple as being a bodybuilder capable of bench-pressing 560 pounds. Hulking out is an animalistic state of mind, a sympathetic Mr. Hyde to Bruce Banner’s Dr. Jekyll. Ferrigno carried actor Bill Bixby’s take on Bruce Banner into his own glimmers of humanity, but otherwise just let it rip. If you saw Ferrigno Hulk running your way, you would run… the other way. 

2. The Avengers Hulk

Even in The Avengers, Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner is under some control of his Hulk, firing up his own rage coils on cue to fight in the Battle of New York. So there’s an argument that exalting his roar in the film’s famous 360-degree team shot isn’t pure “hulking out” — but this is also the greatest shot of the Hulk in any live-action production ever (and leads directly into him over-smashing Chitauri warriors in a burst of Hulk energy), so I’m exalting it in second place. But in first…

1. Avengers: Age of Ultron Hulk

Look at that punim. 

Hulk has only grown refined and sophisticated over the years, but a mind-control spell from Scarlet Witch in Age of Ultron finally lets him hulk out the way that he’s done in the comics — with raw, terrifying strength. Hulk is absolutely grotesque in the movie’s Johannesburg set-piece, and Ruffalo appears to have had a ball contorting his face in every which way. I personally identified with this rampage as someone who will stop at nothing to get a Zyrtec when my eyes are burning red. 

The pinnacle of Hulk acting thus far. Put this face on Mount Hulkmore.