Ok, scattered throughout this piece are a very small few new photos from Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler,” cool, right? But much more importantly, did everyone read Entertainment Weekly’s story on Mickey Rourke’s comeback? Yeah, we’ve all read about it and blogged about it, it seems like old hat by now, right? The reckless, self-destructive behaviour, the arrogance, the chihuahua he left a film set for (2001’s straight-to-video “Luck of the Draw“), etc., right? But holy crap does EW get in deep. We didn’t even think we were going to bother reading it at first, but once we started, there was no going back. Kudos to the writer Chris Nashawaty, who wrote a piece way after the fact, the basically trumps most of the “Mickey Rourke: Comeback Kid” stories out there.
First off Rourke does something we haven’t read him do: deny he had work done on his face and suggest boxing fucked up his once-beautiful face.
”Somebody said to me the other day, ‘You don’t look like you used to. ‘But who does? I mean, when I was boxing I had six nose operations, I had cartilage taken from behind my ear, I had short-term memory loss, I’ve got an equilibrium problem, I don’t have as many teeth in my head as I used to.”
The actor is still eccentric too. His apartment shows off an antique gun (but only one because his publicist asked him to put the rest away) and he receives a monthly house call from a doctor, who administers a catheter IV drip into his arm to replenish whatever the actor’s immune system and mineral deficiencies are short on.
The most telling quote from Darren Aronofsky is kind of brutal and illustrates why Rourke identified with the character and had a hart time shooting some of his scenes. ”There were scenes that I think were extremely painful for Mickey. He felt the shame of the character very deeply. Very deeply. Mickey knows what it’s like to fall from a great height” (this relates to a lot of quotes Rourke has said in the press previously that he didn’t want to take on the role initially and was relieved when at one point, when they cast Nicolas Cage instead – he didn’t want to deal with that kind of pain).
Rourke reign of terror effected relationships with lots of people, Barbet Schroeder who directed him in the amazing ’80s classic, “Barfly” (Rourke dropped out of a follow-up project last minute, ”I remember I put a note on his front door saying that I would never speak to him again. And I haven’t,” Schroeder said)
Then the interview gets intimately painful. Rourke refuses to speak about his father, but then eventually reveals that he was physically abused by him and begins to weep, having to excuse himself a few times.
“That’s where it all went wrong. I lived in an area [Liberty City, a poor neighborhood of Miami] where you could get away with murder with what you did to your kids. I don’t like talking about this because I don’t want to put myself in the victim category, but when you’re 5, 6, 7, you can’t fight back. And I never got over what happened.”
This part is just a emotional kick in the stomach.
Rourke is crying now. He seems like he wants to talk about it, but he’s sobbing too hard to get the words out. He gets up and walks around the room, deeply breathing in and out, dabbing at his eyes. ”I thought I knew what pain was when my mother and father split up,” he continues. ”That’s why I’ve never been able to have a birthday party since I was 6. Because my father never came. I never saw him again… Well, I saw him once. He drank himself to death at 47. The year after I met him again. I introduced myself. It was like a big boulder off my shoulder. He was a former bodybuilder. But he didn’t look like that no more.”
Rourke’s luck was never great and he was seemingly always attracted to self-destructiveness. His former wife, model/actress Carré Otis, spiraled into heroin addiction and the actor suggests he put the hurt on film producers that were enabling her which only helped destroy his reputation in the industry.
“I spent a long time dealing with getting my wife off heavy drugs. And I got myself into some shit, putting some people in the hospital who were giving her drugs. So I lost movies over that. But it was my wife! If you’re going to give somebody in my family bad drugs, you’re gonna deal with me. I’m not going to say, ‘No, I’m an actor.’ I could have dealt with it differently, but I didn’t.”
The article expounds abounds on his ridiculous spending habits (“a house way too expensive, cars, entourage, women, jewelry. If you ain’t ever had it, once you get it, you spend it as quick as you can. I ain’t never seen no Brinks truck at a funeral and there ain’t gonna be one at mine”) and includes laudatory quotes from film critic doyenne Pauline Kael, Sean Penn (”Mickey’s taken baseball bats to [his talents], blowtorches, blackjacks, and bullwhips, and he just can’t get rid of them.”) and Alan Parker who directed him in “Angel Heart” alongside Robert DeNiro.
The climactic scene in “The Wrestler,” were Rourke as Randy “The Ram” tearfully tells the audiences he’s abandoning the sport that’s he’s washed up and that the sport hasn’t love him back aside from the fans? He wrote it himself. ”I can’t watch it. ‘I haven’t watched it. Maybe three or four years down the road.”
Anyhow, those are the meatiest quotes and obviously there are tons of them. Totally worth a full read. “The Wrestler” co-stars Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood and comes out December 19 via Fox Searchlight. Rourke is likely a shoo-in for Best Actor nomination if he doesn’t fuck it up.
