The Unlikely Return of Mickey Rourke
Tue, Jan 13, 2009
by Amy Wallace
I first met Rourke on a Sunday morning in
September 2002, half a dozen years before anyone would think to put his name and “Academy Award” in the same sentence.
It was early, probably 7 am. That must be said out of fairness to Rourke, given what happened. And he was understandably tired, having spent days at the Toronto International Film Festival promoting a movie he didn’t like much called
Spun. He’d only done
Spun, he says now, because his new agent told him to, and in those days he was lucky to even have an agent.
So on that morning, when the agent, an earnest young man named David Unger, called Rourke’s room at Toronto’s Four Seasons to say he was waiting with an airport limo idling outside, Rourke didn’t say what he wanted to say. He didn’t tell Unger to leave without him because he was lying next to an incredible piece of ***. (“Oh, this girl,” he recalls now. “She was a ****ing 12.”) Instead Rourke told himself, mantra-like,
Can’t let the old Mickey come back, and got up, kissed the girl, grabbed his luggage and his favorite Chihuahua, Loki, and came downstairs.
I was in the lobby, where I had bumped into the waiting Unger, whom I knew a little. The agent offered me a ride to the airport. Did I want to share a limo with Mickey Rourke? **** yeah, I did.
Stepping out of the elevator, he was bleary-eyed but smiling, with a bandanna tied around his head and Loki in a mesh carrier slung over his shoulder. We said hello as he parked his luggage at the curb and piled into the car. Rourke had things on his mind (apparently very beautiful things — “To this day,” he says, “every time I go to Toronto I look for that girl”), so we rode mostly in silence for several minutes. Then, suddenly, Rourke erupted. “Where’s my dog?” he yelped, and in his voice there was no badass, only terror. “Stop the car!!” The driver pulled over, even though we were on the freeway and there was no shoulder. Rourke jumped out and ran to the trunk. A moment later he fished out his dog, who hadn’t yet suffocated, and proceeded to kiss her repeatedly on the lips. Loki, buried in the dark, was like his career at the time. Rourke cherished her because she made him feel special.
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I ask if he has regrets.
Photo credit: photo by Carlos Serrao
“Of course I do,” he says, exasperated. “My head was up my *******. I’ve got a lot of ****ing regrets.” Regret, of course, is a big part of what makes
The Wrestler so devastating. "It was almost embarrassing. There was a lot of shame. A lot of living in disgrace in a state of hopelessness that was really close to the belt,” Rourke says, remembering the period when he had to ask friends for money just to get by. The parallels were so strong, in fact, that when Rourke asked Aronofsky if he could rewrite his dialogue, the director said yes. “There’s a speech at the end of the movie where I say I never thought I’d be back here in the ring again — that I don’t hear as well as I used to and I don’t have as many teeth in my mouth. And when you get to be a certain age they want to put you on the goddamn shelf. That was all something I was able to write from what had happened to me,” he says. “I mean, that’s how I felt with the acting.”
We are sitting at a corner table in an Italian cafe a few blocks from the rented Greenwich Village townhouse he shares with his beloved dogs and his manager. It is early December, just as the Academy Award frenzy is beginning to peak. This interview is part of that frenzy, part of playing “the game” that the old Rourke once disdained so vocally. But now, for perhaps the first time, he is not too proud to admit he wants to win. “Everybody wants to play in the big game on Sunday,” he says. “But if you don’t train hard — if you don’t do your roadwork — you’re not gonna.” Five days after he said that, Rourke nabbed a Golden Globe nomination for best actor.
It’s been a long time since Rourke, who once studied with Elia Kazan and Sandra Seacat, has won attention for his acting instead of his antics. He gained critical acclaim in 1981 for his breakout role in
Body Heat and, in 1983, got the best supporting actor award from the National Society of Film Critics for his role in
Diner. In 1984 many praised his unforgettable performance as a small-time hood with big dreams in
The Pope of Greenwich Village. He became a sex symbol by romancing Kim Basinger in
9 1/2 Weeks. But he never got nominated for an Oscar.
“Listen, I get laid more now than I did back then, so I’m not going to complain,” he says.
Rourke looks out from under a cowboy hat, his two front teeth rimmed in gold for an upcoming role, his blue jeans slack on a lean frame (he’s almost back to his normal weight, 195), his mien a weird mix of warmth and ferocity. Because he is trained as a boxer, many think wrestling came easy for Rourke. On the contrary, he says: Boxing is short, quick movements, while pro wrestling is more acrobatic, with exaggerated, roundhouse swings. “It’s like ping-pong and rugby,” he says of the two sports. “I had so many habits to break.”
Rourke, who for years has followed anti-aging regimens that include self-administered B-12 shots and intravenous vitamin replacement sessions, is serious about his body. Even before The Wrestler he worked out for 80 minutes five times a week, a mixture of cardio, light weights, and boxing — mitts only, no contact. “I can’t do any contact anymore,” he says, repeating a doctor’s assessment.
To acquire the physique of a wrestler he pushed himself to the limit. (Officially, he did it with twice-daily workouts with a former Israeli cage fighter and seven meals a day, but when I ask if he also used steroids or human growth hormone, he smiles conspiratorially and says, “When I’m a wrestler, I behave like a wrestler.”) He did all of his own stunts, diving off the ropes onto the mat, flipping backward through the air, even doing what pro wrestlers call “gigging.” Aronofsky asked Rourke, in their first conversation about the film, if he was familiar with the term. He wasn’t, so the director explained: To give audiences the gore they want, wrestlers often hide bits of razor blade in their taped-up wrists. Then, at the right moment, they cut themselves, usually on the face so the blood will flow into their eyes. “Darren said, ‘I’m going to want you to gig in the movie.’ And it was always on my mind: God, when are we going to do that scene,” Rourke says. “So the night of the scene, he says, ‘You really don’t have to do it.’ I said, ‘**** you. I’m gigging!’ ”
The scene is hard to watch, not just for the blood but for the desperation in Rourke’s eyes. “I wasn’t doing it for my art; I was doing it for Darren,” Rourke says. “Because Darren challenged me. He knew how to push my buttons.”
Ah, Rourke’s buttons. Who hasn’t heard about them? “I’ve got to watch my *** every second of the day,” he tells me. “I mean, I’m not as out of control and unpredictable as I was. I’m accountable now. I really am. But still there’s always going to be that little man with the hatchet inside of me.”
In almost every interview over the past year, Rourke has laid the blame for this psychic torment on the abuse he suffered at the hands of a brutal stepfather. And he has thanked God and his therapist, a guy he simply calls Steve, for helping him to keep his rage in check. How well Rourke has heeded God and Steve is put to the test when I mention a recent profile in the
New York Times Magazine in which Rourke’s stepfather denied any abuse and painted the actor as a poser who has faked his own suffering to justify his tough-guy persona and get attention. Rourke bristles, but doesn’t blow.
“Let me just say one thing to you: I studied — and struggled and persevered and concentrated and focused like a ****ing monk — to be the actor that I am, and then I threw it all away,” he says. “You don’t do that unless you got issues, and those issues are ****ing real. And there’s no gray there. They’re all ****ing black and white.”
Rourke’s sister and stepsister issued a statement denouncing the
Times piece. They noted that had the writer contacted them, they would’ve backed their brother up.
You can almost see Rourke catching himself again as he changes the subject and begins to talk of being grateful. There were the friends who gave him work when he could barely afford to eat: Francis Ford Coppola, who featured him in the 1997 courtroom drama
The Rainmaker; Sean Penn, who put him opposite Nicholson in his ’01 movie
The Pledge; even Sylvester Stallone.
In 1999, Stallone came over to Rourke in a restaurant. “He said, ‘Listen, I’m doing this movie, and I need somebody in it who looks like they can kick my ***. You look like you can kick my ***,’ ” Rourke recalls. “I’m sitting there going, ‘I can barely pay for this bowl of spaghetti. Goddamn do I need a movie.’ ” But when his agent got the call about the job, a remake of
Get Carter, the money was so low it was “disrespectful,” Rourke says. He turned it down but thanked Stallone for the gesture. Suddenly, the money doubled. Rourke took the job. When he arrived on set, an assistant filled him in. “Sly really wanted you to be in the movie, and that ******* producer wouldn’t pay for it,” so Stallone kicked in the rest of the money.
Wouldn’t it be sweet, I ask, if it turns out that his fall from grace and long fight back up gave him the strength to finally redeem himself?
Rourke strokes his mustache with his right thumb. Then he speaks. “I know what I can do. And very few people can do what I can do,” he says firmly. “I ain’t got no problem with not getting an Oscar this year. Sure, I’d be disappointed. But you know what, then I’ll say, ‘**** you, I’m coming back next year.’ And I’ll goddamn mean it. I ain’t going away this time.”
This article originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Men’s Journal.
mensjournal.com
Photography: Carlos Serrao
Director of Photography: Michelle Wolfe
portusimaging.com
Photography: Carlos Serrao
Director of Photography: Michelle Wolfe
etoday.ru
Photography: Marcel Hartmann
hartmann-marcel.com
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