The Village Voice recently sat down with Mickey Rourke to talk about the trails and tribulations he had gone through t0 make his portrayal of Randy “The Ram” Robinson in Darren Aronofsky’s recent Toronto International Film Festival hit “The Wrestler” all the more fitting. We found it to be an interesting expose of the film and its lead actor.
In Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler,” Randy “The Ram” proclaims, “I hated the ’90s. The 90’s fuckin’ sucked.” For the actor playing the character, Mickey Rourke, that statement couldn’t be any closer to the truth. Just like the character he portrayed in the film, he was a star in the late 80s’, but pissed his career away in the 90’s and was left with few options to make ends meet.
Even as an up and coming student of acting, Rourke turned the craft into an obsession. “I wanted to be like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Chris Walken and Harvey Keitel. I wanted to be a really great actor. And If I worked really, really, fucking hard, maybe one day I could do that. And I worked really, really hard. I had no social life. I lived like a monk. For weeks on end, I slept on the couch at the Actors Studio, working on scenes for months.”
But even when success struck, and Rourke had finally cemented his status as one of Hollywood’s top talents, satisfaction was no where to be found for him.
Taking Roles For Cash
“I was waiting for the great picture, and it didn’t happen. And I was living way above my means. I bought a big house, and because I was always turning shit down-formula stuff, Hollywood stuff-I got in a jam, so I has to do a movie called “Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man”. They paid me a lot of money, and I went fuckin’ bonkers because I sold out and I hated myself for it. Some kind of anger kicked off, about the fact that I’d put myself in a position to have to do that movie. The demons took over.”
Worst Career Move Ever: The “Pulp Fiction” Fuckup
Soon after he left acting to resurrect his professional boxing career. During this time, his agent called and told him that an up-and-coming director named Quentin Tarantino wanted to meet about a role in small budget indie film called “Pulp Fiction.” “I said, ‘Who else is in it?’ She said , ‘John Travolta.’ I took the script, and I remember throwing it at her. I didn’t even read it.”
So went the ’90s for Rourke, who struggled to find decent roles, and found himself struggling to make ends meet. When a few rouge directors like Vincent Gallo finally decided to take a chance on the actor (a great role as a ruthless bookie in “Buffalo ’66”), Rourke finally found his career picking up again when he was finally cast in blockbusters such as “Sin City,” and a few years later he was approached by Darren Aronofsky with a less-than appealing offer to play the type of role he had been waiting for his entire career.
“He sits down, and for the first five minutes, he tells me how I fucked up my whole career for 15 years behaving like this, and I’m agreeing with everything.” After that, Aronofsky pointed his finger at the actor-something, Rourke says, that not so long ago would have promoted him to say: “Don’t do that, OK buddy?”-and laid out the ground rules. “He goes: ‘You have to listen to everything I say. You have to do everything I tell you. you can never disrespect me. And you can’t be hanging out at the clubs all night long. And I can’t pay you.’ And I’m thinking: ‘This fucker must be talented, because he’s got a lot of nerve to say that.” Then Aronofsky told Rourke that if he did all of those things, he would get the actor an Oscar nomination. “The moment he said that, I believed him” says Rourke.
But as time went on it began to look like it wouldn’t actually materialize for Rourke. Aronofsky had trouble securing any kind of financing for the film with a washed up, loose cannon actor as the star, and eventually it was decided the project couldn’t go anywhere with Rourke in the lead. Rourke wasn’t exactly upset at hearing this news, “I knew that Darren wanted me to revisit these dark places, these painful places. And then there was the physical part-the two months of training-and the not getting paid.”
Upon receiving the phone call from his agent hearing the news that Darren Aronofsky had actually got the pictured financed with him in the lead, Rourke was less than thrilled, “My reaction was ‘Oh fuck! Can’t you get me something else? But despite the painful physically regimen, the dark places he was asked to go during the shoot, and the low budget, Rourke found a way to make it work, and has helped make “The Wrestler” a surprise hit of the year and has people talking Oscar for his performance.
“The Wrestler” has screened to rave reviews at the TIFF and NYFF, and is set for a theatrical release this winter on December 19th.
