The New York Times published a profile piece on “The Wrestler” star Mickey Rourke over the weekend and it wasn’t too flattering or too kind.
We mentioned it earlier in the week and said the Times kind of “hammer him and essentially suggest he’s been milking his hard-times comeback story. It’s kind of harsh and they basically call him emotionally insincere.”
The Times wrote:
“So what if he cries at the same moment in the same story in every interview? So what if his candor sometimes sounds like the bad dialogue from one of his many bad movies (“I have no one to go to to fix the broken pieces in myself”) or that his self-deprecation seems culled from the stock stories of so many fading actors (“I was in 7-Eleven, and this guy says, ‘Didn’t you used to be a movie star?'”)? So what if he seems disingenuous, at best, when he says he can’t remember that critics nominated him one of the world’s worst actors in 1991 (“I probably would have voted with them”).”
Us again: “To be fair, Rourke sounds like a 12-step recovery guy, not necessarily from booze, but from emotional issues and everyone knows that 12-steppers repeat their stories over and over again like mantras.” See (for random example) Brian Goodman, the director of “What Doesn’t Kill You.” At TIFF, the guy talked about being 12 years clean and still he’s got that 12-step talk ingrained in him. It doesn’t leave you.
Deadline Hollywood talked to Rourke’s sister and stepsister who say the Times was unfair.
“We were shocked and deeply saddened to read Pat Jordan’s overtly biased piece about our brother Mickey Rourke in The New York Times Magazine. Although our childhood is searingly painful to discuss, we absolutely needed to speak out to set the record straight. Tragically, what our brother has said about his abusive childhood barely scratches the surface of what really happened. If Pat Jordan had tried to contact us, we would’ve told him the truth. We love Mickey very much and stand by his account of our early years.”
We’re not like some fan sites that blindly stick by their man no matter what, but we have to side with the sisters here, the Times piece was a bit over-the-top.
