Who is Keen Ruffalo? The ‘Sterling Point’ star is following in his famous father’s footsteps.

If you’re watching Sterling Point and wondering why Connor looks so familiar, there’s a good reason. 

He’s played by Keen Ruffalo — the son of Marvel star Mark Ruffalo. Once you know they’re related, the resemblance between the 25-year-old actor and his famous dad is hard to unsee.

Sterling Point, a coming-of-age drama which premiered on Prime Video on Aug. 5, is Keen’s breakthrough role. He plays a teenager who inherits an island from the grandfather he never knew.

You may also have seen him onscreen before. Keen had small roles in two of his dad’s movies when he was younger, and he appeared in two of his TV shows last year. 

But despite the famous last name, Keen says he went through dozens of auditions before landing his big break. Here’s what to know about him.

Who is Keen Ruffalo?

Born in June 2001, Keen is the oldest of Mark Ruffalo’s three children with his wife Sunrise Coigney.

His first name was a last-minute decision. Mark told Men’s Journal in 2013 that he and Coigney were struggling to decide what to call him, so for two weeks after Keen was born the couple tried out a different name each day.

Then, Mark said, the couple received a call warning them that they needed to choose a name by noon. He grabbed a dictionary and started flipping through it. When he reached the Ks, he landed on “Keen.” He read Coigney the definitions, including “sharp” and “fond of.” She replied, “That’s perfect.”

Keen grew up on his family’s dairy farm in Callicoon, N.Y. — not exactly a typical Hollywood childhood for the son of a movie star. “

Contrary to popular belief, I was actually raised on a farm and kept very far away from all of that, just because my dad didn’t enjoy being in it,” Keen told Cultured. “He was like, ‘I just wanna go and hang out on my farm and do work.'”

In February 2024, Keen joined Mark as he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. During his speech, Mark paid tribute to his family, saying: “You’ve taught me so much about being a parent, about being a man, about being an actor.”

How did he get into acting?

As a child, Keen was “dragged” to movie sets with his father as a child, he said — leaving him with little interest in pursuing an acting career. But he made his screen debut at age 12 as an extra in Begin Again, the 2013 romantic comedy starring his dad and Keira Knightley. Four years later, he had a background role in the Marvel blockbuster Thor: Ragnarok, in which Mark played the Hulk.

Keen initially gravitated toward fashion. He enrolled at Drexel University to study fashion design but dropped out when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, leaving him unsure of what he wanted to do next.

“Acting makes my dad happy, maybe I’ll enjoy it,” Keen said he recalled thinking at the time.

Keen began studying acting and performing in theater. He told Cultured that his father wanted him to put in the work before he began seriously auditioning. “My dad didn’t want to hand me or my siblings anything, because it’s just not how he was raised,” he said.

He continued taking classes and auditioning while picking up smaller roles, including appearances in two of his father’s TV shows in 2025: HBO’s crime drama Task and the comedy-drama Hal & Harper.

But he says there was plenty of rejection along the way. Keen estimates he’d been through more than 100 auditions and expected to spend the next few years working on indie projects — so landing a major role in Sterling Point came as a surprise.

“I definitely did not expect it,” he told WWD. “I don’t think my parents did either because my dad was like, ‘This is messed up.'”

Sterling Point isn’t Keen’s only big role this summer. He also stars in Nimrods, a road-trip comedy inspired by Green Day, which hits theaters Aug. 14.

The actor is already thinking about what’s next. He told WWD he wants to keep auditioning and work with new people. He may even go back to school to study acting, he said.

That means more of what his dad warned him the job would involve: “Suffering, auditioning.”

“That’s obviously most of what the job is,” Keen said.