Mickey Rourke

Photographer: Helmut Newton



swiatobrazu.pl


Mickey Rourke as private eye Angel Heart, Vanity Fair 1986
kultur-online.net



cineathome.tumblr.com


revistaestilo.abril.com.br


ura-inform.com
 
Gold's used to, and still does, house many celebrities but only those that were serious about working out.
One person that stood out from that crowd was Mickey Rourke.
Read on to gain some insight to how his training helped in filming for 'The Wrestler'.


By:
Kris Gethin

When I used to reside a large portion of my time in Gold's gym in Venice, I would watch some of the professional bodybuilders training in hopes of gaining a secret strategy to emulate the shape of their physiques. By studying Charles Glass train his clients I was able to gain a few of those gems.
Gold's used to, and still does, house many celebrities but only those that were serious about working out. One person that stood out from that crowd was Mickey Rourke.
He would train with the intensity of a professional bodybuilder, throw around large poundage's that would gain stares from other members, but most of all he had a physique that many in that gym envied, which is quite an accomplishment considering this was in Gold's gym in Venice.

Mickey's gym appointments weren't like clockwork but his training schedule was - 1-1 ½ hours of brutal resistance work followed by 30-60 minutes cardio.
One day I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Mickey through his trainer - Mike Ryan. I found Mickey to be a person of great character, very funny and from that day forth very approachable. 2008 saw his massive return to the spotlight in the hugely anticipated and critically acclaimed movie - The Wrestler.
The Wrestler is a movie that craved the physical attributes and the personal history of Mickey Rourke in order to play the character Randy "The Ram" Robinson. Not only were the wrestling scenes physically very demanding, so was the character.
Mickey, as devoted as ever to his bodybuilding fans, allowed us to interview him through his busy schedule about his training and how it helped him prepare for The Wrestler.

[ Kris ] Although you were at the top of the game as an actor, you turned to professional boxing as you felt more of an accomplishment due to its challenge. Is this why you have stayed in great shape since; because of the physical challenge?
[ Mickey ] Not necessarily. My return to boxing was due to the fact I had a long amateur career and had never turned pro. It helped me answer personal issues with unfinished business.

[ Kris ] Apart from the physical attributes you gain from taking care of your diet and by staying consistent to your weight training regime, what are the mental attributes you feel that you accomplish from this lifestyle?
[ Mickey ] I think from the boxing, I gained discipline and focus as well as a strict daily regimen to stay in top condition. It is something that you have to be consistent with to constantly take yourself to a higher level.

[ Kris ] In your upcoming movie "The Wrestler" you display a physique that is envious of many guys in their 20's and 30's although you are in your 50's.
How have you been able to maintain such a lean and muscular physique, given that you have also succumbed too many injuries and broken bones throughout your career as a fighter?
[ Mickey ]
I have always stayed in the gym. I hit the iron for 20 years in Gold's in Venice and enjoyed the company of many athletes who participated in bodybuilding.
I had great times in the old Gold's gym also when it was the Mecca of bodybuilding. I met a lot of great people and used to love to hang out with Lylie Alzedo, Chris Cormier, Flex Wheeler, Dorian Yates, and especially a man who I trained with for some years - the great guru of bodybuilding Charles Glass.My father was also a bodybuilder and I recall many happy days as a child going to the YMCA and spending time with him in the gyms in New York.

[ Kris ] I understand that you had to work arduously with professional wrestlers for your latest movie role and you performed your own stunts. Did your bodybuilding regime help or hinder you in these circumstances due to your muscle mass?
[ Mickey ]
The bodybuilding of course helped but what a lot of people don't know and understand is you can't look like the way I do in 6 months. I have been bodybuilding for 20 years and muscle has memory.
It's just a matter of how big you want to get or how cut you want to get, and this all depends on the amount of cardio or the diet you are on. We were on a high protein, low carb diet that included 3-4 protein shakes a day. The cardio was very important as well as my ab work during this period of training.

[ Kris ] How much did you weigh in The Wrestler. Was it much different to when you had to prepare for your fights as a professional boxer?
[ Mickey ]
It was very different. As a professional fighter, I weighed around 192 lbs and it would take me 12 weeks to get down to 166, and that was hard. To play the role in The Wrestler I had to put on 30+ lbs.
I really thought putting on the 30+ lbs would be fun and easy; I was terribly mistaken. When I got up to around 217 lbs, I reached a plateau and flattened at that weight. I still had another 12-13 to gain, and in order to do that we had to reassess and change the workout and diet regimen - more food, heavier workouts.

[ Kris ] I know you are quite a bodybuilding fan and I hear Dorian Yates will be attending your London Premier of The Wrestler? Are you likely to have a workout with him whilst you are in the UK?
[ Mickey ] Yes, I always enjoy working out with the pros; the guys who have been there and done it. There is so much information that the pros know about. They are educated, informed and have been in the trenches so it is nice to get advice from the guys who really know.

[ Kris ] We wish you all the best with The Wrestler Mickey.
[ Mickey ] Thanks so much Kris and I hope you enjoy The Wrestler - it was the toughest movie I ever made!

bodybuilding.com

 
Mickey Rourke out walking with a friend and his dog in New York, NY on April 2, 2011



isopix.be
 
Photographer: Richard Aujard

About this photograph:
Mickey Rourke
Arles
1997
5am
A car journey. Mickey sees this street and says to me: "Come on, let's wink at Doisneau!" He put down the bottle of wine and he thought about this friend that he liked to meet. I pointed the headlights and I shot.


2nipp35.jpg


en.yellowkorner.com
 
April 3, 2011
Mickey Rourke heads to a New York City park to start training for an upcoming film role. Rourke is set to portray gay rugby player Gareth Thomas in an upcoming feature film. Mickey was spotted exercising with a trainer in an attempt to shed pounds for the upcoming athletic role.





Photo by PacificCoastNews.com
zimbio.com




Rugby training Mickey Rourke style: Intense workout, lunch... and then a cigarette

By Jessica Satherley
4th April 2011


‘I’m not in my prime any more but as an actor I need to look like I can play rugby’, Rourke said in a BBC interview.
But despite trying to get into shape, Rourke headed to a restaurant for lunch following his session and puffed away on cigarettes.
The Hollywood bad boy is training to portray a gay Welsh rugby player in the film, based around the real-life sportsman Gareth Thomas.

Thomas, who now plays rugby league for the Crusaders, confirmed in 2009 that he was gay, becoming the first professional team athlete to be open about being homosexual. Rourke became friends with the athlete after reading about the former Wales rugby union captain in an article and his interest in Thomas led him to want to create the film.


Gareth Thomas’s manager, Thomas Palladino, gave WalesOnline an update on the film, saying: ‘Mickey wants to film everything in Wales, although it is early days. He really wants to throw himself into Welsh and rugby and really learn as quickly as he can. Mickey intends to get as close to the character as he can, as he thinks it is a great story.’
Rourke said of learning the accent: ‘Everyone told me how tough the Welsh accent was going to be so I’ve started listening to the London accent and the Welsh accent for help but I’m getting nowhere.’

dailymail.co.uk
 




lashlee71.com




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
theage.com.au
 
Such Sweetness in Mickey. Too bad he took up boxing: phew, he was really hot when he was younger. But I think I read the facial surgery was due to the boxing. His style is all over the map. I tend to like slightly more classic looks on him, but I admire his devil-may-care attitude.
 
Passion Play also starring Megan Fox and Bill Murray was slated to go straight to video a few weeks ago after receiving bad reviews. Image Entertainment which picked up the distribution for the film after its run at the Toronto Film Festival last year will now give it a short run in selected theaters in New York and Los Angeles starting May 6, 2011. It'll then move onto dvd May 31,2011.
New Passion Play Poster below, tagline reads: Love is stronger than death.



lashlee71.com
 
Wednesday, April 6,2011

Bash Compactor: Night Is A Wire


Party for Duran Duran at Mister H, the new nightclub in the Mondrian Soho


By Gerry Visco

I was surprised to find a neon sign reading, "This is not a brothel. There are no prostitutes here" at Mister H, the chichi new nightclub in the Mondrian Soho. After all, the place looks like a Chinese whorehouse. Of course, I was covered up—my top layer for the evening was a straitjacket—and easily made it into the elite spot for a party for 1980s rock gods Duran Duran.

Despite the exclusivity of the event, the crowd, hosted by Lyle Derek and Noah Valentyn, was remarkably laidback. "I love your top," shouted a pretty young thing lounging on a sofa across from me. I thanked her and added that I had purchased the outfit at Halloween Adventure, then I ran off to find a friend with a bottle of liquor I could sip from— with prices for bottles in the triple digits, I wasn't about to pass it up.
For such a trendy spot, the club seemed to be doing lots of things right. For example, Miss Guy was DJing, and the sort of celebrities flitting around included blue-eyed Adonis James Marsden and Yeah Yeah Yeah Nick Zinner—cute guys with real talent, none of these reality TV stars or trampy, vampy ingénues.

I'm no celebrity ***-kisser and I wouldn't bother them, but when I spotted Mickey Rourke skulking near by, I had to say hello. "Hey Mickey, you're looking great. Take a picture with me?" I asked him. "Of course," he said with a grin. "But only if I can wear these!" He grabbed my blue, cat-eye glasses. They definitely suited the actor.

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nypress.com
 
The Late Show (1994)





lashlee71.com



Bullet DVD film featurette interview





lashlee71.com
 
Mon, 11/04/2011

Mickey Rourke training for new rugby role in NYC




holymoly.com
 
i love bullet, that movie is amazing (and underrated)
 
Tom Folino: On Mickey Rourke, “A Quiet Brilliance”

by Tom Folino (February 10, 2009)


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In honor of his recent comeback, Cinetic Rights Management has unearthed and released the first film starring Mickey Rourke. “Love In The Hamptons” (1976), based on a New Yorker magazine short story, is the tale of a complicated romance between a waiter and waitress.
Over 30 years after it was made, this short film is exclusively available on Amazon VOD. Writer/director Tom Folino shares his thoughts on casting a young Mickey Rourke for his short film, and what that experience means today.

"One could sense a quiet brilliance in Mickey, even as a kid. He was a young man of few words but palpable sensitivity. When I first met Mickey, I had reached a point of near desperation in casting the lead role of Swede. I had seen nearly 60 young men and none seemed right. About to give up and abandon the project, I got an 11th hour call from a wonderful casting director, Juliet Taylor, who thought she might have the right fellow. That fellow turned out to be Mickey Rourke! Obviously, Juliet was correct, I knew it the minute I first met him.

Although Mickey had not yet done film work, he was already a gifted actor. Since I was under major time constraints, it was essential to find someone for the role who already possessed the attributes of the character, as there was little time for rehearsals and “the discovery process.” To me, Mickey was Swede, a working class kid, the son of a plasterer. A kid with with a tough veneer, but, underneath, an almost naïve optimism and belief that he could “make a difference.” It was a stroke of great good fortune that I got that call from Juliet, just in the nick of time.

A short anecdote reveals just how dedicated this young actor was to living in his character’s skin, the same devotion so alive and well that we see in his performance currently in “The Wrestler.” About a minute before we were to roll camera on a shot of Swede and Sandy waking up at the beach, in the front seat of the convertible, Mickey crouched down and grabbed a huge handful of sand, which he promptly poured into his eyes. Alarmed at the possible damage, I asked him what in the world he thought he was doing. His reply: “your eyes are always gritty when you wake up, aren’t they?”

Mickey was always prepared, always knew his lines and was always eager to deliver. We could never have shot our little picture in the five days we did, had it not been so. And, by the way, he was an incredibly thoughtful and polite guy, and I still see those qualities in Mickey today when I see him interviewed on recent talk shows. It’s a thrill to witness this current resurgence in his career… about time and fully deserved. Congratulations, Mickey, keep up the great work!"

indiewire.com
 
Scherzi a parte

Each episode of Scherzi a parte includes a prank pulled on a hollywood star and/or other pranks pulled on italian celebrities.

 
Mickey Rourke Hates The Movie He Did With Megan Fox

mickeyrourkemeganfox.jpg

This time last year, Mickey Rourke's forever soulmate Loki (R.I.P.) put in a reincarnation request up in heaven's administrative offices hoping that he will come back to earth as a psychiatrist who can give his former owner some much needed mental health help. Loki did this after Mickey said that Megan Fox is the best actress he's ever worked with. Those words numerically translate into 5150, so Loki had a good reason to freak out. But Loki can cancel that request and stay safe up in the cloud bosoms of heaven, because Mickey is taking that shi* all back. Sort of. Mickey has come down from the high he got after inhaling the intoxicating words of wisdom that Megan's brain farts out from time to time.

At the after-party for Scream 4 the other night, Vulture asked Mickey about the movie he did with 50 Cent ("A really bad movie") and then Megan Fox's name came up. Mickey finally kept it real.

What about your movie with Megan Fox and Bill Murray?
"Terrible. Another terrible movie. But, you know, in your career and all the movies you make, you’re going to make dozens of terrible ones."

You called Megan Fox, like, one of the best actresses of all time.
"That I worked with [smirk]."

That movie’s getting limited release.
"That’s because it’s not very good."

I know a good movie we can talk about: your rugby movie.
"That’ll be a great movie. We start shooting February."

Okay, okay, so the head on Mickey's neck is still slightly stuck up Megan's culito, but I have a feeling he's slowly starting to pull out (UNCLENCH, MEGAN, UNCLENCH!). Maybe! Loki has hope! And speaking of hope, I HOPE that Mickey puts out his own movie review site called Rotten Mickeys where he rates his own movies, because he's good at that shi*. Mickey doesn't even have to say anything. If one of his movies is terrible, he just has to make the dried salmon grouch face he's making in the picture above.
dlisted
 
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I liked the interview on Letterman. Mickey seems so humble and gentle - for a boxer!!
 

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