His Fists Are Up and His Guard Is Down
By PAT JORDAN
YOU MEET MICKEY, you can’t help liking him. He rescues abused dogs! He cries a lot: over his stepfather’s supposed abuse; the loss of his brother to cancer and his dogs to old age; the failure of his marriage to the actress Carré Otis. He admits he destroyed his own career, because, as he puts it: “I was arrogant. . . . I wasn’t smart enough or educated enough” to deal with stardom. He is candid about the people he has crossed paths with: Nicole Kidman is “an ice cube”; Michael Cimino, the director of “Heaven’s Gate,” “is crazy” and “nuts”; and the producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. is “a liar.”
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”) or even making a terrible movie that went straight to video, “Exit in Red,” in 1996 — despite the fact that the love interest in that movie was then his wife?
So what? The police stopped him from protesting at a pet store in Miami Beach. He has been a rescuer of abused dogs because he saw in their abuse the kind of abuse he says he suffered at the hands of his stepfather. He told me he beat up his wife’s heroin supplier and put him in a coma. He cradled his brother in his arms at the moment he died of cancer. He destroyed his own career with bad choices, bad acting and the kind of self-destructive behavior on movie sets and in life that Alan Parker, who directed him in “Angel Heart,” called “a nightmare” and “dangerous.” And still, he wouldn’t quit trying to get acting jobs, so that now, in his 50s, he is remaking his career in its third act and has a movie, “The Wrestler,” opening next month in New York and Los Angeles that critics have applauded, calling his performance worthy of an Oscar. Mickey Rourke, Academy Award winner?
ROURKE WAS SUFFERING from a sore throat. He summoned his personal assistant, J. P., and sent him to the drugstore for throat lozenges. Rourke was sitting on a sofa in the parlor of the Greenwich Village town house he rents, with his beloved 16-year-old miniature chihuahua, Loki, asleep on a pillow beside him. Another chihuahua slept on a pillow on the floor. The room was a shrine to the many chihuahuas Rourke has owned and buried. A huge photograph of Loki’s father, Beau Jack, named after a prizefighter, hung in a gilt frame over the fireplace. There were photographs of dogs everywhere, along with urns and lighted votive candles before a statue of the Virgin Mary draped with rosary beads. When Beau Jack collapsed of a heart attack, Rourke gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until he knew Beau Jack was gone, then he took the body to a church to be blessed. Rourke likes little dogs, he told me, because they live longer than big dogs and because you can pick them up, hold them close, smell their fur and feel their hearts beating.
“I had no expectations,” Rourke said of his latest movie. “I was just happy they let me work again.” (Darren Aronofsky, who directed “The Wrestler,” told me, “On the first day of shooting, when the A.D. said, ‘Bring No. 1 to the set!’ Rourke said, ‘I haven’t heard No. 1 in years.’ No financiers would bankroll the movie because of Mickey, except one, which gave us $6 million.”)
Rourke went on to say: “I wasn’t worrying about carrying a movie after so long. I was worried Darren wanted me to go to some dark places, and I didn’t know if I wanted to work that hard.”
Randy (the Ram) Robinson, Rourke’s character, is a once-famous, old-time-showman wrestler and now a beat-up old man at the end of his career. He has lost everything — his wife, his daughter, his money, his fame — and, after a heart attack, is living out his impending death alone, except for the occasional comfort of a stripper, in a trailer as battered as he is. “For 12 years I was alone, I had lost everything,” Rourke said. “The three people closest to me — my brother, my grandmother and my ex-wife — were no longer there. I had no real friends. I saw a few girls, Russian strippers mostly, but I wasn’t looking for a girlfriend. My wife’s name was tattooed on my arm.” His eyes teared up. “She was the love of my life.” (They were married from 1992 to 1998; she still models.) He paused a moment, then went on: “I was quite shocked to learn that I was O.K. with being alone. I still am today. I’m more comfortable alone than the Ram. He’s in a state of hopelessness. The only problem is, Who do I share the good things happening to me with? My dogs, I guess.”
Like Rourke, the Ram is searching for redemption through repentance. Unlike Rourke, however, there will be no third act in the Ram’s life. Which is why “The Wrestler” is not “Rocky” with wrestling; there’s no satisfying resolution for the aging hero, despite what some critics wrote after the film made its debut at the Venice Film Festival this summer.
Evan Rachel Wood plays the Ram’s estranged, lesbian daughter, with whom he’s trying to connect, to atone for his having abandoned her. Wood was thrilled to be in the movie, she told me, but she had misgivings about Rourke. “I heard rumors,” she said. “That he was intense. That he wouldn’t give it up for anyone. I was prepared to kill or be killed.” Wood said she and Rourke didn’t interact off-screen. Aronofsky wanted to keep their on-screen relationship “awkward and uncomfortable,” she said. “Besides, Mickey never broke character after a scene. I’ve never seen anyone so zoned out. It was crazy to watch. Mickey was the Ram.”
Aronofsky told me that Rourke’s life experiences were important to the film. “Was I aware of the parallels to Mickey’s life?” he asked. “What do you think?” Aronofsky also described another benefit of Rourke’s time in the wilderness: “When an actor like Mickey disappears and then shows up back on screen, there’s a freshness in them that’s not common with older actors who have been working all along. We wanted the complexity he had in ‘Diner.’ ”
Rourke doesn’t look the way he did in his “Diner” days. “I look back at ‘Diner’ and ‘Body Heat,’ ” he said, “and I don’t know that person.” He has lost his soft, fragile beauty. Sitting on his sofa, combing his fingers through his long, stringy hair, a stubble of beard on his chin, he looked more like the Ram. Defeated. Puffy, battered face. That he is all but unrecognizable from his early movies is to his advantage now. Filmgoers won’t see him in “The Wrestler” and flash back to his other films. In Rourke’s third act, he is literally a new face and a new actor. He has lost the tics that were once a sign of an original talent, then later a kind of posturing. The sly, sensitive smile with a hint of sex and menace. The languid gestures, the touching of his face and hair (always tortured into a ’50s pompadour), as if he were caressing himself. The mumbled lines that suggested sensitivity. Today his elusive, almost feminine presence is gone.
J. P., the assistant, returned with the lozenges. Rourke popped one into his mouth just as his little black pug shuffled into the parlor. “Get the hell away from me,” Rourke snapped at it. “Go on.” The pug cringed by my feet, and I petted it. Rourke said the pug was “the dumbest dog on the planet.” Rourke got his first dog as a present from Carré Otis and has had more than a dozen dogs since. Several of them he rescued from the pound just before they were to be euthanized. They have been his comfort during his dark times.
“One time things were so bad I didn’t want to be here anymore,” Rourke said. “Then I see Beau Jack looking at me as if to say, ‘But we need you.’ ” Rourke’s eyes teared up. He petted Loki, sleeping beside him. “Loki is the love of my life.” He feeds her bacon, chocolate and peanut butter. I told him those things aren’t good for a dog. He snapped: “She’s 16 years old, for Chrissake! She can have whatever she wants.” I told Rourke about my old dog, Nero, who is 16, and how my wife called me the night before to tell me that his back legs were paralyzed, and he couldn’t walk.
“Well, you can’t put him down,” he said. “I never put my dogs down.” Then Rourke excused himself and left the room. Loki’s head popped up, her eyes wide. She stared at the empty doorway.
IN ROURKE’S FIRST ACT, in the early 1980s, when he was in his 20s, he jump-started his career with parts in “Body Heat” and “Diner,” which led to his first starring role in the greatly underappreciated “Pope of Greenwich Village.” He was praised for his original on-screen persona, and because, as one critic put it, “he made his kindness seem inviting and real.” In “Diner,” he is about to seduce the harried wife of a friend when he has a bout of conscience and demurs. In “Body Heat” he offers to plant a firebomb so his friend won’t get hurt. In “Pope,” he plays an almost Christlike figure who spends the entire movie trying to save his cousin, his girlfriend and an old Irish crony from their own self-destructive instincts, at his own expense.
By the late 1980s, in Rourke’s second act, he was a famous leading man in a string of bad movies that continued through the ’90s. What makes Rourke’s choices astounding is knowing what movies he is said to have turned down: “48 Hrs.,” “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Platoon,” “Rain Man,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Top Gun,” “Tombstone.” Instead he chose to star in a string of soft-core movies and tough-guy thrillers. His characters are either cartoonish, counterculture road warriors from the ’60s (“Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man,” which he said is the only movie he regrets making), beleaguered saints fighting corruption (“Year of the Dragon”), sadistic killers (“Desperate Hours”) or preening fops like the psychiatrist in “Exit in Red,” who treats his patients while wearing sunglasses and smoking through a long cigarette holder. Rourke’s acting in those movies is cringe-inducing, a caricature of his early work. He is merely imitating his good acting in broad strokes, capturing only his earlier stylized cool, his smile, his gestures, his mumbling, with none of the depth of character he exhibited in “Diner” and “Body Heat.”
Rourke likes to say, kiddingly, that only six people saw his films of the late ’80s and ’90s, and he may be right. At least in America. In France, the French discovered in Mickey Rourke America’s greatest actor. They loved his cool, his on-screen cruelty, his seediness, his sexual depravity. Rourke told the European press that the French appreciated good acting because they were “more enlightened” than American filmgoers. (“I have no idea why I said that,” Rourke told me with his sly smile. “But I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have in those days.”)
ROURKE CAME BACK into the parlor and sat down on the sofa. Loki relaxed, laid her head back down on the pillow and fell asleep.
“I don’t know if I was working out my psychological problems on screen,” Rourke said. “Maybe subconsciously. I was going through a turbulent relationship with Carré, which was more riveting and exciting than any movie part.”
Rourke didn’t think his behavior on sets was “dangerous” — “I didn’t punch anyone,” he said — but, he admits, “I screamed a lot and lost my temper.” It didn’t help that he began taking his bodyguards to the set, his new best friends, a contingent of Hell’s Angels that terrified directors and the crew. His off-screen persona as a real-life bad guy took over, he said, “and I became more known for that than my acting.”
Rourke didn’t notice when his pug jumped onto the sofa while he was talking. Rourke called out to J. P., “Get me some ice cubes.” J.P. entered the room with a bowl of ice cubes and handed them to Rourke. Rourke sucked on one to soothe his sore throat, then said: “I resented all the money and what came with it, the way people treated me in a special way. I didn’t know how to play the game. Nobody told me it was a business. I thought my acting talent transcended the business of films. I never had a game plan for my career. I didn’t have the tools for that. If I would have been educated enough, I might have avoided a lot of pain. So I became arrogant and self-destructive. I fought everyone ’cause I thought that was a kind of strength, but it became my weakness.”
In the 1990s, Rourke said, he “lost respect for acting,” because in Hollywood, “they set the bar so low.” He said his fans got angry when he voiced his opinion about acting, calling it “women’s work.”
Rourke stood up and spread his legs, as if for balance, and said: “Ever see the way old boxers stand, like this, for equilibrium, because they’ve been hit in the head so much? Then it happens to you.”
Rourke knows about being hit in the head because, he claimed, he was a Golden Gloves boxer in his teens. He said he had 26 fights and won 20, 17 by knockouts. He planned on making a career of boxing until he suffered a concussion in the ring and “they wouldn’t let me fight anymore.” So he turned to acting, on a whim, because “I liked that you could escape who you were and be someone else, someone smarter, tougher.” When Rourke’s movie career tanked in the ’90s, he turned back to boxing in his late 30s because, he said, “I’d be less of a man if I didn’t react violently to the war in my head.”
Rourke returned to his hometown, Miami, where he lent his name to a nightclub in South Beach called “Mickey’s” and began training for his first professional fight at the Fifth Street Gym, where Muhammad Ali once trained. This began a wild period in Rourke’s life, when he lived out his tough-guy fantasies, not on screen but in his personal life. “I didn’t want to answer to anybody,” he said. “I lived a nomadic life.”
In 1994, Rourke was arrested for assaulting Carré Otis. (She dropped the charge.) That year he was also charged with resisting arrest during a fight outside the South Beach nightclub. Shortly after that, the club’s name was changed to XTC, because, as one club promoter said at the time, “Mickey’s name doesn’t draw people anymore.”
As for his boxing career, Rourke said: “I was fighting guys 15 years younger than me. . . . But I won 10 of 12 fights and had two draws.” Although his record sounds impressive, the fights themselves were less so, according to articles in The Miami Herald. Its headlines included “Rourke’s Latest Fight Nothing but a Farse [sic]” and “Fans Boo Rourke After Draw.” The Herald ran photos of Rourke, his face bloodied, lunging gracelessly at his opponent. World Boxing magazine asked, in a headline in 1994, “Mickey Rourke: Acting Like a Boxer . . . or Boxing Like an Actor?” Still, those fights were good for Rourke’s psyche — he was finally a real-life tough guy — and good for his acting career. He got so beat up in his fights, suffered so many broken bones in his face, that his face was no longer that of the Mickey Rourke of “9 1/2 Weeks.”
Sitting on his sofa, Rourke said: “I had a lot of shame. I thought it was more manly to take that shame out in anger. So I took it out on everyone else.” While he was talking, his pug had snuggled up against his hip and was sleeping.
“What shame?” I asked.
Rourke’s eyes teared up again. He didn’t speak for a long moment. Then he said: “It began before my acting. When my mother divorced my father, she remarried a brutal man.” Rourke stopped, fought back tears. “You know, I’m a real proud dude.”
Rourke was born in Schenectady, N.Y., in 1952. He had a younger brother and sister. His father left the family when Rourke was 6, and Rourke’s mother moved to Miami, where she married a tough Miami Beach cop named Eugene Addis. Addis had four boys and a daughter of his own and would later have another daughter with Rourke’s mother. All nine children lived together in what sounds like a “Brady Bunch” existence, until you talk to Rourke.
Rourke told me he grew up in Liberty City, a black section of Miami. It was a tough neighborhood with only a few white families. “But I loved growing up there,” he said. “I was one of a few white guys on an all-black football team with mismatched uniforms.” Because his brother, Joey, was two years younger than he was, Rourke said he took it upon himself to be Joey’s protector, both against his stepfather’s abuse and neighborhood toughs. When five of them beat up Joey one day, Rourke vowed, he said, to get revenge. “It took me a year,” Rourke said. “Finally, I went to Joey and told him, ‘I got them all.’ Joey said, ‘You’re sick, bro.’ ”
Rourke told me: “I protected him like a father. He got cancer at 17, but didn’t die until four years ago. In my arms.” Rourke stopped talking. His eyes teared up again. Finally, he said, “Joey was the love of my life.”
Rourke described his life with Joey in that house as essentially he and Joey against the world. “We didn’t have much to do with our stepbrothers,” he said. And as for his mother, who is divorced from Addis and has Alzheimer’s disease, he added: “I loved my mother, but I don’t like her. I have a lot of resentment for the situation she put us in. I tried to tell her, but she turned her back on it.” What he tried to tell her about was the abuse he says was being inflicted on him and Joey by his stepfather. (He is coyly vague about that “abuse” except to say that it wasn’t sexual.)
“When my real father left us when I was 6,” Rourke said, “the last thing I told him was, ‘Daddy, I’ll never call anyone else Daddy but you.’ Then, in Miami, my stepfather demanded I call him Daddy. I refused. . . . Then finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I called him Daddy.” Rourke stopped again, waiting for his tears to subside. “I should have stood up to him more. Not be a victim. But I was only 7 years old.” Thus was born Rourke’s life-long sense of shame that he claimed he tried to expiate through his tough-guy persona both on the screen and in his real life. “It took my whole life to forgive myself for calling him Daddy,” Rourke said. “I took it out on everyone else and became hard.”
THE VOICE ON THE PHONE responded with an obscenity. “We never lived in Liberty City,” Eugene Addis said. “That was an all-black neighborhood. We lived in a white section near Miami Shores in a brand-new home I got for being a Navy vet in World War II.” Addis is 81 years old and lives in an apartment complex in Hallandale Beach, Fla. He swims every day in the pool to keep in shape, a tough guy still. “He never spoke the truth in his life,” Addis went on. Still, of all his nine kids: “Mickey was the best of the bunch, a good kid and a helluva athlete. All my boys were good kids. They all got along. When my boys moved in with Mickey and Joey, they all touched palms.”
Addis said that as kids, Mickey and Joey were never close. Joey had more in common with Addis’s tough sons because “Joey was a real horse. If anyone needed protecting it was Mickey. That’s why I took him to the Fifth Street Gym. I bought him boxing gloves and paid for a trainer. The trainer worked with him for six months, and he kept telling me, ‘I can’t get Mickey into the ring to fight.’ Finally, Mickey had his first fight, and he walked out of the ring. Golden Gloves! Mickey was never in the Golden Gloves. He has these fantasies.”
The boxing trainer Angelo Dundee told me, “I don’t think Mickey ever had an amateur fight,” and Brian Adams, the director of The New York Daily News Golden Gloves, told me that no one involved with the organization believes Rourke ever had a Golden Gloves fight. (The national Golden Gloves organization says its records don’t go back that far.)
Addis insisted that he never abused Mickey, Joey or any of his sons, “because they never needed manhandling. Mickey was the best kid I had. I had no reason to abuse him. His mother laughed at that ‘Daddy story’ when she read it. Hell, I didn’t care if he called me Daddy. But after living with me for six months, Mickey came to me and said, ‘Can I call you Daddy?’ I said, ‘Whatever makes you feel secure.’ When I asked him once why he said all those things about me in the press, he said, ‘Aw, Dad, I gotta tell the press something.’ Listen! Right now I’m in better shape than Mickey Rourke ever was. If I wanted to kick his ass I could. But I never did.” Then Addis said, “You wanna hear a story?”
When Rourke attended Horace Mann Junior High School as a teenager, Addis said, he walked to school every day with Joey and his stepbrothers. At the time, Addis was working the night shift as a Miami Beach cop. He would sleep until 3 in the afternoon, then get up and have a cup of coffee at the kitchen table and wait for his boys to come home. One day, Rourke came home alone. Addis asked him, “Where are your brothers?” Rourke said, “They’re in a fight at school.” Addis said, “How many are in the fight?” Rourke said, “Half the school.” Addis said: “Then what are you doing here? You should be with your brothers.” Rourke said, “I came to get you.”
“Hell, they were only kids,” Addis told me. “They weren’t really gonna hurt each other. I told Mickey, ‘What do ya want me to do, go there and shoot them?’ He went up to his room and then a half-hour later his brothers came home. They had a few black eyes, bloody noses, but they weren’t hurt. They said, ‘When the fight started Mickey took off.’ ”
ROURKE WAS HAVING LUNCH at a little trattoria around the corner from his town house. The trattoria was crowded with diners, none of whom seemed to recognize Rourke. Behind him, at another table, were J. P. and Rourke’s publicist, Paula Woods. J. P. has been friends with Rourke for more than 20 years. Paula Woods has been his publicist since she held that role for the 2005 movie “Sin City,” in which he appeared. They hit it off, Paula told me, because they trusted each other. Paula and J. P. always seemed to be hovering behind Rourke, waiting to fulfill a request, ice cubes, a glass of water, a light for his cigarette.
Rourke was saying that in this, the third act of his career, “I’ve fallen in love with acting again.” He began his latest act in much the same way he began the first, with small parts in two movies that led to his starring role in “The Wrestler.” Francis Ford Coppola took a chance on Rourke and gave him a modest role in his 1997 movie “The Rainmaker.” Rourke played the sleazy lawyer Bruiser Stone, a slick, silver-haired con man who favors silk suits, pinky rings and French cuffs that he is constantly shooting. (Many viewers didn’t recognize Rourke as Bruiser until the closing credits.) When Coppola screened an early version of the film, the audience was enthralled by Rourke’s performance, Rourke said, so Coppola went back and added more of his scenes.
Rourke was next offered a major role in “In the Cut,” a movie directed by Jane Campion that came out in 2003. But Rourke didn’t end up getting that or any other part in the movie because, he said, Nicole Kidman, who was for a time cast as the lead, didn’t want to work with him. Rourke looked up from his fish with his sly smile. “If I was Nicole Kidman, I wouldn’t want to work with me, either,” he said. “She’d have to stand up to the plate and get exposed. She wouldn’t have known what hit her. I was flat broke at the time. That would have been my first big part in a comeback. But it was my fault to put myself in a position where someone like her could dictate whether I worked or not.”
A year later, the director Tony Scott hired Rourke to play another sleazy lawyer, Jordan Kalfus, in the thriller “Man on Fire.” It was a small but weighty role that was originally larger than what appeared in theaters. “I had a big scene with Denzel that was cut,” Rourke said, referring to the movie’s star, Denzel Washington. I asked him why. Rourke gave me that sly smile and said: “I dunno. I didn’t cut the scene. Tony Scott didn’t cut the scene.”
I called Scott and asked about the deleted scene. “I can’t remember any scene like that that was cut,” he said. Then he said he met Rourke years ago, when they were both in their motorcycle days, “when Rourke was always trying to poach my women. Rourke’s got a real dangerous side to him.” That’s why Scott cast him in “Man on Fire” and later as a bounty hunter in the 2005 movie “Domino.” “I always try to cast actors to be on film what they are in real life,” Scott said.
The younger Mickey Rourke from the 1990s might have reacted more forcefully, some might say more violently, to the loss of his role in “In the Cut” and his deleted scene in “Man on Fire.” But the Mickey Rourke of today is older, maybe tired of fighting battles, maybe more understanding of the fact that Kidman and Washington had what he calls the “juice” that he no longer has.
“I learned to keep a lid on that little man inside me with two hatchets,” he said. “It’s not hard to do since the repercussions are so severe. I learned I had to conduct myself in a professional manner. I had lost my career because I had put the blame everywhere but where it belonged. On me. I didn’t want to make the same mistake again. You know, actors live in a constant state of fear that it’ll all slip away.
“You want to earn respect in your old age,” he went on to say. “You want to walk into a restaurant and have people say: ‘There’s Mickey Rourke. He was great in “The Wrestler.” ’ You don’t want them jumping out of windows.”
Rourke is 56 years old, but, he said: “If you write that you won’t be my friend. I don’t tell my age. They’ll categorize you. I can play a 50-year-old wrestler but I can’t be a 50-year-old actor. You know, every time Brett Favre throws an interception today they say it’s because he’s an old man.”
Rourke stood up. He wanted a cigarette. J. P. handed him one. Rourke and I went outside. It was a cool, sunny day in New York. Rourke dragged on his cigarette on the sidewalk as people hurried past him while we talked about the coming presidential election. I asked if he was going to put an Obama sign in front of his town house. He smiled and said, “O-who?”
Rourke said he no longer likes to spout off about politics, ever since he was said to have given money to the Irish Republican Army years ago and was severely criticized for that in the media. (He denies the claim.) “I’m not educated enough to voice my opinion on politics,” he said. He did admit that he liked Sarah Palin, however, even though he said the press didn’t. “She doesn’t speak to the media,” he said. “But she speaks to us.”
Rourke dropped his cigarette and stubbed it out on the sidewalk. Just before we went back inside, he said: “What are you gonna do about your dog? The old guy who’s paralyzed.”
This time, I was the one who teared up. “I’m gonna carry him outside every day,” I said. “I’ll hold up his back legs with my hands and let him go on me four times a day.”
Rourke nodded. “That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
Pat Jordan is a frequent contributor to the magazine.
November 30, 2008
His Fists Are Up and His Guard Is Down
By PAT JORDAN
YOU MEET MICKEY, you can’t help liking him. He rescues abused dogs! He cries a lot: over his stepfather’s supposed abuse; the loss of his brother to cancer and his dogs to old age; the failure of his marriage to the actress Carré Otis. He admits he destroyed his own career, because, as he puts it: “I was arrogant. . . . I wasn’t smart enough or educated enough” to deal with stardom. He is candid about the people he has crossed paths with: Nicole Kidman is “an ice cube”; Michael Cimino, the director of “Heaven’s Gate,” “is crazy” and “nuts”; and the producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. is “a liar.”
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”) or even making a terrible movie that went straight to video, “Exit in Red,” in 1996 — despite the fact that the love interest in that movie was then his wife?
Mickey Rourke is, after all, an actor. The roles he has played and the life he has lived have so blurred one into another in his mind’s eye that even he doesn’t seem to know when he’s acting or when he’s being real. He has spent his entire adult life playing not fictional characters but an idealized delusional fantasy of himself.
So what? The police stopped him from protesting at a pet store in Miami Beach. He has been a rescuer of abused dogs because he saw in their abuse the kind of abuse he says he suffered at the hands of his stepfather. He told me he beat up his wife’s heroin supplier and put him in a coma. He cradled his brother in his arms at the moment he died of cancer. He destroyed his own career with bad choices, bad acting and the kind of self-destructive behavior on movie sets and in life that Alan Parker, who directed him in “Angel Heart,” called “a nightmare” and “dangerous.” And still, he wouldn’t quit trying to get acting jobs, so that now, in his 50s, he is remaking his career in its third act and has a movie, “The Wrestler,” opening next month in New York and Los Angeles that critics have applauded, calling his performance worthy of an Oscar. Mickey Rourke, Academy Award winner?
ROURKE WAS SUFFERING from a sore throat. He summoned his personal assistant, J. P., and sent him to the drugstore for throat lozenges. Rourke was sitting on a sofa in the parlor of the Greenwich Village town house he rents, with his beloved 16-year-old miniature chihuahua, Loki, asleep on a pillow beside him. Another chihuahua slept on a pillow on the floor. The room was a shrine to the many chihuahuas Rourke has owned and buried. A huge photograph of Loki’s father, Beau Jack, named after a prizefighter, hung in a gilt frame over the fireplace. There were photographs of dogs everywhere, along with urns and lighted votive candles before a statue of the Virgin Mary draped with rosary beads. When Beau Jack collapsed of a heart attack, Rourke gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until he knew Beau Jack was gone, then he took the body to a church to be blessed. Rourke likes little dogs, he told me, because they live longer than big dogs and because you can pick them up, hold them close, smell their fur and feel their hearts beating.
“I had no expectations,” Rourke said of his latest movie. “I was just happy they let me work again.” (Darren Aronofsky, who directed “The Wrestler,” told me, “On the first day of shooting, when the A.D. said, ‘Bring No. 1 to the set!’ Rourke said, ‘I haven’t heard No. 1 in years.’ No financiers would bankroll the movie because of Mickey, except one, which gave us $6 million.”)
Rourke went on to say: “I wasn’t worrying about carrying a movie after so long. I was worried Darren wanted me to go to some dark places, and I didn’t know if I wanted to work that hard.”
Randy (the Ram) Robinson, Rourke’s character, is a once-famous, old-time-showman wrestler and now a beat-up old man at the end of his career. He has lost everything — his wife, his daughter, his money, his fame — and, after a heart attack, is living out his impending death alone, except for the occasional comfort of a stripper, in a trailer as battered as he is. “For 12 years I was alone, I had lost everything,” Rourke said. “The three people closest to me — my brother, my grandmother and my ex-wife — were no longer there. I had no real friends. I saw a few girls, Russian strippers mostly, but I wasn’t looking for a girlfriend. My wife’s name was tattooed on my arm.” His eyes teared up. “She was the love of my life.” (They were married from 1992 to 1998; she still models.) He paused a moment, then went on: “I was quite shocked to learn that I was O.K. with being alone. I still am today. I’m more comfortable alone than the Ram. He’s in a state of hopelessness. The only problem is, Who do I share the good things happening to me with? My dogs, I guess.”
Like Rourke, the Ram is searching for redemption through repentance. Unlike Rourke, however, there will be no third act in the Ram’s life. Which is why “The Wrestler” is not “Rocky” with wrestling; there’s no satisfying resolution for the aging hero, despite what some critics wrote after the film made its debut at the Venice Film Festival this summer.
Evan Rachel Wood plays the Ram’s estranged, lesbian daughter, with whom he’s trying to connect, to atone for his having abandoned her. Wood was thrilled to be in the movie, she told me, but she had misgivings about Rourke. “I heard rumors,” she said. “That he was intense. That he wouldn’t give it up for anyone. I was prepared to kill or be killed.” Wood said she and Rourke didn’t interact off-screen. Aronofsky wanted to keep their on-screen relationship “awkward and uncomfortable,” she said. “Besides, Mickey never broke character after a scene. I’ve never seen anyone so zoned out. It was crazy to watch. Mickey was the Ram.”
Aronofsky told me that Rourke’s life experiences were important to the film. “Was I aware of the parallels to Mickey’s life?” he asked. “What do you think?” Aronofsky also described another benefit of Rourke’s time in the wilderness: “When an actor like Mickey disappears and then shows up back on screen, there’s a freshness in them that’s not common with older actors who have been working all along. We wanted the complexity he had in ‘Diner.’ ”
Rourke doesn’t look the way he did in his “Diner” days. “I look back at ‘Diner’ and ‘Body Heat,’ ” he said, “and I don’t know that person.” He has lost his soft, fragile beauty. Sitting on his sofa, combing his fingers through his long, stringy hair, a stubble of beard on his chin, he looked more like the Ram. Defeated. Puffy, battered face. That he is all but unrecognizable from his early movies is to his advantage now. Filmgoers won’t see him in “The Wrestler” and flash back to his other films. In Rourke’s third act, he is literally a new face and a new actor. He has lost the tics that were once a sign of an original talent, then later a kind of posturing. The sly, sensitive smile with a hint of sex and menace. The languid gestures, the touching of his face and hair (always tortured into a ’50s pompadour), as if he were caressing himself. The mumbled lines that suggested sensitivity. Today his elusive, almost feminine presence is gone.
J. P., the assistant, returned with the lozenges. Rourke popped one into his mouth just as his little black pug shuffled into the parlor. “Get the hell away from me,” Rourke snapped at it. “Go on.” The pug cringed by my feet, and I petted it. Rourke said the pug was “the dumbest dog on the planet.” Rourke got his first dog as a present from Carré Otis and has had more than a dozen dogs since. Several of them he rescued from the pound just before they were to be euthanized. They have been his comfort during his dark times.
“One time things were so bad I didn’t want to be here anymore,” Rourke said. “Then I see Beau Jack looking at me as if to say, ‘But we need you.’ ” Rourke’s eyes teared up. He petted Loki, sleeping beside him. “Loki is the love of my life.” He feeds her bacon, chocolate and peanut butter. I told him those things aren’t good for a dog. He snapped: “She’s 16 years old, for Chrissake! She can have whatever she wants.” I told Rourke about my old dog, Nero, who is 16, and how my wife called me the night before to tell me that his back legs were paralyzed, and he couldn’t walk.
“Well, you can’t put him down,” he said. “I never put my dogs down.” Then Rourke excused himself and left the room. Loki’s head popped up, her eyes wide. She stared at the empty doorway.
IN ROURKE’S FIRST ACT, in the early 1980s, when he was in his 20s, he jump-started his career with parts in “Body Heat” and “Diner,” which led to his first starring role in the greatly underappreciated “Pope of Greenwich Village.” He was praised for his original on-screen persona, and because, as one critic put it, “he made his kindness seem inviting and real.” In “Diner,” he is about to seduce the harried wife of a friend when he has a bout of conscience and demurs. In “Body Heat” he offers to plant a firebomb so his friend won’t get hurt. In “Pope,” he plays an almost Christlike figure who spends the entire movie trying to save his cousin, his girlfriend and an old Irish crony from their own self-destructive instincts, at his own expense.
By the late 1980s, in Rourke’s second act, he was a famous leading man in a string of bad movies that continued through the ’90s. What makes Rourke’s choices astounding is knowing what movies he is said to have turned down: “48 Hrs.,” “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Platoon,” “Rain Man,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Top Gun,” “Tombstone.” Instead he chose to star in a string of soft-core movies and tough-guy thrillers. His characters are either cartoonish, counterculture road warriors from the ’60s (“Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man,” which he said is the only movie he regrets making), beleaguered saints fighting corruption (“Year of the Dragon”), sadistic killers (“Desperate Hours”) or preening fops like the psychiatrist in “Exit in Red,” who treats his patients while wearing sunglasses and smoking through a long cigarette holder. Rourke’s acting in those movies is cringe-inducing, a caricature of his early work. He is merely imitating his good acting in broad strokes, capturing only his earlier stylized cool, his smile, his gestures, his mumbling, with none of the depth of character he exhibited in “Diner” and “Body Heat.”
Rourke likes to say, kiddingly, that only six people saw his films of the late ’80s and ’90s, and he may be right. At least in America. In France, the French discovered in Mickey Rourke America’s greatest actor. They loved his cool, his on-screen cruelty, his seediness, his sexual depravity. Rourke told the European press that the French appreciated good acting because they were “more enlightened” than American filmgoers. (“I have no idea why I said that,” Rourke told me with his sly smile. “But I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have in those days.”)
ROURKE CAME BACK into the parlor and sat down on the sofa. Loki relaxed, laid her head back down on the pillow and fell asleep.
“I don’t know if I was working out my psychological problems on screen,” Rourke said. “Maybe subconsciously. I was going through a turbulent relationship with Carré, which was more riveting and exciting than any movie part.”
Rourke didn’t think his behavior on sets was “dangerous” — “I didn’t punch anyone,” he said — but, he admits, “I screamed a lot and lost my temper.” It didn’t help that he began taking his bodyguards to the set, his new best friends, a contingent of Hell’s Angels that terrified directors and the crew. His off-screen persona as a real-life bad guy took over, he said, “and I became more known for that than my acting.”
Rourke didn’t notice when his pug jumped onto the sofa while he was talking. Rourke called out to J. P., “Get me some ice cubes.” J.P. entered the room with a bowl of ice cubes and handed them to Rourke. Rourke sucked on one to soothe his sore throat, then said: “I resented all the money and what came with it, the way people treated me in a special way. I didn’t know how to play the game. Nobody told me it was a business. I thought my acting talent transcended the business of films. I never had a game plan for my career. I didn’t have the tools for that. If I would have been educated enough, I might have avoided a lot of pain. So I became arrogant and self-destructive. I fought everyone ’cause I thought that was a kind of strength, but it became my weakness.”
In the 1990s, Rourke said, he “lost respect for acting,” because in Hollywood, “they set the bar so low.” He said his fans got angry when he voiced his opinion about acting, calling it “women’s work.”
Rourke stood up and spread his legs, as if for balance, and said: “Ever see the way old boxers stand, like this, for equilibrium, because they’ve been hit in the head so much? Then it happens to you.”
Rourke knows about being hit in the head because, he claimed, he was a Golden Gloves boxer in his teens. He said he had 26 fights and won 20, 17 by knockouts. He planned on making a career of boxing until he suffered a concussion in the ring and “they wouldn’t let me fight anymore.” So he turned to acting, on a whim, because “I liked that you could escape who you were and be someone else, someone smarter, tougher.” When Rourke’s movie career tanked in the ’90s, he turned back to boxing in his late 30s because, he said, “I’d be less of a man if I didn’t react violently to the war in my head.”
Rourke returned to his hometown, Miami, where he lent his name to a nightclub in South Beach called “Mickey’s” and began training for his first professional fight at the Fifth Street Gym, where Muhammad Ali once trained. This began a wild period in Rourke’s life, when he lived out his tough-guy fantasies, not on screen but in his personal life. “I didn’t want to answer to anybody,” he said. “I lived a nomadic life.”
In 1994, Rourke was arrested for assaulting Carré Otis. (She dropped the charge.) That year he was also charged with resisting arrest during a fight outside the South Beach nightclub. Shortly after that, the club’s name was changed to XTC, because, as one club promoter said at the time, “Mickey’s name doesn’t draw people anymore.”
As for his boxing career, Rourke said: “I was fighting guys 15 years younger than me. . . . But I won 10 of 12 fights and had two draws.” Although his record sounds impressive, the fights themselves were less so, according to articles in The Miami Herald. Its headlines included “Rourke’s Latest Fight Nothing but a Farse [sic]” and “Fans Boo Rourke After Draw.” The Herald ran photos of Rourke, his face bloodied, lunging gracelessly at his opponent. World Boxing magazine asked, in a headline in 1994, “Mickey Rourke: Acting Like a Boxer . . . or Boxing Like an Actor?” Still, those fights were good for Rourke’s psyche — he was finally a real-life tough guy — and good for his acting career. He got so beat up in his fights, suffered so many broken bones in his face, that his face was no longer that of the Mickey Rourke of “9 1/2 Weeks.”
Sitting on his sofa, Rourke said: “I had a lot of shame. I thought it was more manly to take that shame out in anger. So I took it out on everyone else.” While he was talking, his pug had snuggled up against his hip and was sleeping.
“What shame?” I asked.
Rourke’s eyes teared up again. He didn’t speak for a long moment. Then he said: “It began before my acting. When my mother divorced my father, she remarried a brutal man.” Rourke stopped, fought back tears. “You know, I’m a real proud dude.”
Rourke was born in Schenectady, N.Y., in 1952. He had a younger brother and sister. His father left the family when Rourke was 6, and Rourke’s mother moved to Miami, where she married a tough Miami Beach cop named Eugene Addis. Addis had four boys and a daughter of his own and would later have another daughter with Rourke’s mother. All nine children lived together in what sounds like a “Brady Bunch” existence, until you talk to Rourke.
Rourke told me he grew up in Liberty City, a black section of Miami. It was a tough neighborhood with only a few white families. “But I loved growing up there,” he said. “I was one of a few white guys on an all-black football team with mismatched uniforms.” Because his brother, Joey, was two years younger than he was, Rourke said he took it upon himself to be Joey’s protector, both against his stepfather’s abuse and neighborhood toughs. When five of them beat up Joey one day, Rourke vowed, he said, to get revenge. “It took me a year,” Rourke said. “Finally, I went to Joey and told him, ‘I got them all.’ Joey said, ‘You’re sick, bro.’ ”
Rourke told me: “I protected him like a father. He got cancer at 17, but didn’t die until four years ago. In my arms.” Rourke stopped talking. His eyes teared up again. Finally, he said, “Joey was the love of my life.”
Rourke described his life with Joey in that house as essentially he and Joey against the world. “We didn’t have much to do with our stepbrothers,” he said. And as for his mother, who is divorced from Addis and has Alzheimer’s disease, he added: “I loved my mother, but I don’t like her. I have a lot of resentment for the situation she put us in. I tried to tell her, but she turned her back on it.” What he tried to tell her about was the abuse he says was being inflicted on him and Joey by his stepfather. (He is coyly vague about that “abuse” except to say that it wasn’t sexual.)
“When my real father left us when I was 6,” Rourke said, “the last thing I told him was, ‘Daddy, I’ll never call anyone else Daddy but you.’ Then, in Miami, my stepfather demanded I call him Daddy. I refused. . . . Then finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I called him Daddy.” Rourke stopped again, waiting for his tears to subside. “I should have stood up to him more. Not be a victim. But I was only 7 years old.” Thus was born Rourke’s life-long sense of shame that he claimed he tried to expiate through his tough-guy persona both on the screen and in his real life. “It took my whole life to forgive myself for calling him Daddy,” Rourke said. “I took it out on everyone else and became hard.”
THE VOICE ON THE PHONE responded with an obscenity. “We never lived in Liberty City,” Eugene Addis said. “That was an all-black neighborhood. We lived in a white section near Miami Shores in a brand-new home I got for being a Navy vet in World War II.” Addis is 81 years old and lives in an apartment complex in Hallandale Beach, Fla. He swims every day in the pool to keep in shape, a tough guy still. “He never spoke the truth in his life,” Addis went on. Still, of all his nine kids: “Mickey was the best of the bunch, a good kid and a helluva athlete. All my boys were good kids. They all got along. When my boys moved in with Mickey and Joey, they all touched palms.”
Addis said that as kids, Mickey and Joey were never close. Joey had more in common with Addis’s tough sons because “Joey was a real horse. If anyone needed protecting it was Mickey. That’s why I took him to the Fifth Street Gym. I bought him boxing gloves and paid for a trainer. The trainer worked with him for six months, and he kept telling me, ‘I can’t get Mickey into the ring to fight.’ Finally, Mickey had his first fight, and he walked out of the ring. Golden Gloves! Mickey was never in the Golden Gloves. He has these fantasies.”
The boxing trainer Angelo Dundee told me, “I don’t think Mickey ever had an amateur fight,” and Brian Adams, the director of The New York Daily News Golden Gloves, told me that no one involved with the organization believes Rourke ever had a Golden Gloves fight. (The national Golden Gloves organization says its records don’t go back that far.)
Addis insisted that he never abused Mickey, Joey or any of his sons, “because they never needed manhandling. Mickey was the best kid I had. I had no reason to abuse him. His mother laughed at that ‘Daddy story’ when she read it. Hell, I didn’t care if he called me Daddy. But after living with me for six months, Mickey came to me and said, ‘Can I call you Daddy?’ I said, ‘Whatever makes you feel secure.’ When I asked him once why he said all those things about me in the press, he said, ‘Aw, Dad, I gotta tell the press something.’ Listen! Right now I’m in better shape than Mickey Rourke ever was. If I wanted to kick his ass I could. But I never did.” Then Addis said, “You wanna hear a story?”
When Rourke attended Horace Mann Junior High School as a teenager, Addis said, he walked to school every day with Joey and his stepbrothers. At the time, Addis was working the night shift as a Miami Beach cop. He would sleep until 3 in the afternoon, then get up and have a cup of coffee at the kitchen table and wait for his boys to come home. One day, Rourke came home alone. Addis asked him, “Where are your brothers?” Rourke said, “They’re in a fight at school.” Addis said, “How many are in the fight?” Rourke said, “Half the school.” Addis said: “Then what are you doing here? You should be with your brothers.” Rourke said, “I came to get you.”
“Hell, they were only kids,” Addis told me. “They weren’t really gonna hurt each other. I told Mickey, ‘What do ya want me to do, go there and shoot them?’ He went up to his room and then a half-hour later his brothers came home. They had a few black eyes, bloody noses, but they weren’t hurt. They said, ‘When the fight started Mickey took off.’ ”
ROURKE WAS HAVING LUNCH at a little trattoria around the corner from his town house. The trattoria was crowded with diners, none of whom seemed to recognize Rourke. Behind him, at another table, were J. P. and Rourke’s publicist, Paula Woods. J. P. has been friends with Rourke for more than 20 years. Paula Woods has been his publicist since she held that role for the 2005 movie “Sin City,” in which he appeared. They hit it off, Paula told me, because they trusted each other. Paula and J. P. always seemed to be hovering behind Rourke, waiting to fulfill a request, ice cubes, a glass of water, a light for his cigarette.
Rourke was saying that in this, the third act of his career, “I’ve fallen in love with acting again.” He began his latest act in much the same way he began the first, with small parts in two movies that led to his starring role in “The Wrestler.” Francis Ford Coppola took a chance on Rourke and gave him a modest role in his 1997 movie “The Rainmaker.” Rourke played the sleazy lawyer Bruiser Stone, a slick, silver-haired con man who favors silk suits, pinky rings and French cuffs that he is constantly shooting. (Many viewers didn’t recognize Rourke as Bruiser until the closing credits.) When Coppola screened an early version of the film, the audience was enthralled by Rourke’s performance, Rourke said, so Coppola went back and added more of his scenes.
Rourke was next offered a major role in “In the Cut,” a movie directed by Jane Campion that came out in 2003. But Rourke didn’t end up getting that or any other part in the movie because, he said, Nicole Kidman, who was for a time cast as the lead, didn’t want to work with him. Rourke looked up from his fish with his sly smile. “If I was Nicole Kidman, I wouldn’t want to work with me, either,” he said. “She’d have to stand up to the plate and get exposed. She wouldn’t have known what hit her. I was flat broke at the time. That would have been my first big part in a comeback. But it was my fault to put myself in a position where someone like her could dictate whether I worked or not.”
A year later, the director Tony Scott hired Rourke to play another sleazy lawyer, Jordan Kalfus, in the thriller “Man on Fire.” It was a small but weighty role that was originally larger than what appeared in theaters. “I had a big scene with Denzel that was cut,” Rourke said, referring to the movie’s star, Denzel Washington. I asked him why. Rourke gave me that sly smile and said: “I dunno. I didn’t cut the scene. Tony Scott didn’t cut the scene.”
I called Scott and asked about the deleted scene. “I can’t remember any scene like that that was cut,” he said. Then he said he met Rourke years ago, when they were both in their motorcycle days, “when Rourke was always trying to poach my women. Rourke’s got a real dangerous side to him.” That’s why Scott cast him in “Man on Fire” and later as a bounty hunter in the 2005 movie “Domino.” “I always try to cast actors to be on film what they are in real life,” Scott said.
The younger Mickey Rourke from the 1990s might have reacted more forcefully, some might say more violently, to the loss of his role in “In the Cut” and his deleted scene in “Man on Fire.” But the Mickey Rourke of today is older, maybe tired of fighting battles, maybe more understanding of the fact that Kidman and Washington had what he calls the “juice” that he no longer has.
“I learned to keep a lid on that little man inside me with two hatchets,” he said. “It’s not hard to do since the repercussions are so severe. I learned I had to conduct myself in a professional manner. I had lost my career because I had put the blame everywhere but where it belonged. On me. I didn’t want to make the same mistake again. You know, actors live in a constant state of fear that it’ll all slip away.
“You want to earn respect in your old age,” he went on to say. “You want to walk into a restaurant and have people say: ‘There’s Mickey Rourke. He was great in “The Wrestler.” ’ You don’t want them jumping out of windows.”
Rourke is 56 years old, but, he said: “If you write that you won’t be my friend. I don’t tell my age. They’ll categorize you. I can play a 50-year-old wrestler but I can’t be a 50-year-old actor. You know, every time Brett Favre throws an interception today they say it’s because he’s an old man.”
Rourke stood up. He wanted a cigarette. J. P. handed him one. Rourke and I went outside. It was a cool, sunny day in New York. Rourke dragged on his cigarette on the sidewalk as people hurried past him while we talked about the coming presidential election. I asked if he was going to put an Obama sign in front of his town house. He smiled and said, “O-who?”
Rourke said he no longer likes to spout off about politics, ever since he was said to have given money to the Irish Republican Army years ago and was severely criticized for that in the media. (He denies the claim.) “I’m not educated enough to voice my opinion on politics,” he said. He did admit that he liked Sarah Palin, however, even though he said the press didn’t. “She doesn’t speak to the media,” he said. “But she speaks to us.”
Rourke dropped his cigarette and stubbed it out on the sidewalk. Just before we went back inside, he said: “What are you gonna do about your dog? The old guy who’s paralyzed.”
This time, I was the one who teared up. “I’m gonna carry him outside every day,” I said. “I’ll hold up his back legs with my hands and let him go on me four times a day.”
Rourke nodded. “That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
Pat Jordan is a frequent contributor to the magazine.