Support for NPR and the following message come from SAP Concur, a leading brand for integrated travel expense and invoice management solutions.

With SAP Concur solutions, you'll be ready to take on whatever the market throws at you next. Learn more at concur.com.

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley.

Mark Ruffalo has been nominated for an Oscar for the best supporting actor category for his role in the movie Poor Things

Directed by Yorgos Lanthemos

He spoke with our producer Sam Brigger about that role in his career last week. Here's Sam with

more. In poor things Mark Ruffalo plays a character described in the movie as a

CAD and a rake. His name is Duncan Wedeburn and he seduces Emma Stone's character, Bella Baxter,

to run away from her home and fiance and have an adventure with him in Lisbon. Let's hear a scene.

You're a prisoner, but I aim to free you.

Something in you, some hungry being, hungry for experience, freedom, touch, to see the unknown and know it.

So why am I here, you ask?

I'm going to Lisbon on Friday, I'd like you to come.

Lisbon of Portugal?

That is Lisbon I speak of.

God never allow it.

That's why I'm not asking him. I'm asking you. Well I'm not safe with you I'm not safe with you I think. You are absolutely not. In that

Duncan Wedeburn is looking at Bella Baxter like a cartoon cat who's trapped the canary.

What he doesn't realize is that Bella Baxter is no ordinary young innocent to corrupt. She is in fact the result of a Frankenstein-like experiment by a scientist, played by Willem Defoe, who reanimated a dead woman's body by replacing her brain with the brain of her unborn baby.

Bella goes through a rapid awakening to the world around her and to her own body, and like an infant

who doesn't yet know society's norms is uninhibited to a degree

that both attracts Wetherburn and undoes him.

...