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Mickey Rourke is sorry
March 13, 2004
The angry young man is now a remorseful older man, writes Rick Lyman.
Can I get a little bowl of water? Mickey Rourke asks sweetly of the waitress at the Chateau Marmont Hotel, pointing down towards the small dog skittering around between the table legs.
"Dogs are my thing," he says as Loki, a Chihuahua-terrier mix, leaps into his lap and makes a survey of the tabletop. Rourke gently cradles her in one arm and offers her some cappuccino foam.
"I hit the wall about five years ago," Rourke says.
"I remember looking at myself in the mirror and thinking, 'Look at what happened to you'. I had blown everything, you know? I lost my credibility, my marriage, my money, my soul. I said to myself,
'You've got to change'. And I realised that the acting was the only thing I had left."
For the first three years, no one wanted to hire him, no one wanted to meet with him. He was living on what he could raise by selling off the last of his movie-star possessions. And then, a couple of years ago, he got a call out of the blue from David Unger, a young and ambitious agent at ICM.
"He saved me," Rourke says.
Rourke says he realises the days are long gone when studio executives considered him a leading man, critics compared him with James Dean and younger actors sneaked onto the set just to watch him work.
He was just trying to be direct, he says, but he ended up direct-to-video.
"I burned a lot of bridges, you know?" he says.
"People are saying to me now, 'Oh, you're going to have a comeback, you're going to have a comeback'. But it's not that easy for me to have the kind of comeback that someone like John Travolta could have. I spent a lot of years going like this (gestures) to too many people. "Thank God there's a new generation of directors and studio executives, or I wouldn't stand a chance."
Rourke jnr was born in Schenectady, New York State, but grew up in Miami. At 19, he moved to New York and eventually landed at the Actors Studio, where he adopted a fierce love of acting and an attitude. What he didn't land was a job.
"I'd go in and take a meeting and if the guy was looking at me funny, I'd say, 'What are you looking at?', you know?" Rourke says. "I wasn't about to go in there and kiss somebody's butt and appease them to get a role."
It took eight years and many low-end jobs, but his breakthrough finally came with the movie
Body Heat. Soon after, he was a standout in Barry Levinson's
Diner (1982) and overnight became Hollywood's next hot thing.
And as the years passed, he behaved more erratically, battling executives and turning down good roles.He was also surrounding himself with friends from the street, a gaggle of hangers-on including bikers and outright gangsters. By 1991, fed up, Rourke announced he was leaving Hollywood, returning to Miami to get a professional boxing career going.
He was hanging out in Miami with bikers, getting more tattoos, amassing a new entourage of Cuban-American tough guys. He turned up regularly in the tabloid press. One time, he says, he beat up a couple of drug dealers.
"I put one of them in the hospital, and it was in the newspapers," Rourke says. "I did it in the middle of a public joint. Of course, I lost a studio job the next day."
For years, almost no one wanted to hire him.
"That's why I'm so indebted to David Unger for taking me on now," he says.
"It's better having somebody like him than a lot of gangster yes-men that I had around me before."
Rourke now lives in a small place just above the Sunset Strip, in Los Angeles, sees a therapist, goes to the gym every day and spends his evenings at home with his dogs, or wandering down the hill to a grocery store.
"It's not very exciting, which is good for me now," he says.
Rourke says he's trying to do whatever his agent tells him to do. The first project Unger brought him,
Spun, didn't sit right with Rourke.
"I didn't like the material and I didn't really like the character," he says.
"I told David, 'I don't want to do this'. I also didn't like that they weren't going to pay me any money. I mean, they paid us in green stamps." But Unger was adamant.
Rourke got on well with the filmmaker, Jonas Akerlund, and also with Robert Rodriguez, director of
Once Upon a Time in Mexico.
"I could tell, (Rodriguez) was judging me by what he saw," Rourke says.
"That's all I ask, judge me by the man I am now, not by what I was yesterday.
"It's really hard for me to see down the road. I guess I used to look ahead, at one time, but then down-the-road became kind of long and twisting and I got lost somewhere around the bend. I spent a lot of years trying to beat the system and, in the end, the system kicked my behind good."
- New York Times
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