Type casting or a stroke of genius? Mickey Rourke has turned in an extraordinary performance as a washed-up fighter in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler. He tells Donald Clarkeabout the good old days and the bad old days - just don't mention the IRA
A KEY scene in Darren Aronofsky's excellent The Wrestlerfinds the titular hero - a tattered grappler now living in middle-aged obscurity - taking a job at a supermarket deli counter to help pay his meagre rent. Unable to suppress his inclination towards showmanship, the wrestler formerly known as Randy the Ram turns his shift into a performance. He flings parcels of meat at the customers. He engages in heightened banter. Eventually the shtick rings a bell with a customer who asks Randy if he used to be somebody in the 1980s. The wrestler crumples.
It's a very touching sequence, but Mickey Rourke, who plays the Ram with awful, fragile sincerity, still cannot bring himself to watch it.
"I'll tell you why that is," he says. "I can remember being in the five and dime buying a pack of cigarettes late at night. There'd be a line and some guy would eventually say: 'Hey, didn't you used to be in movies?' It was a constant reminder of what I'd thrown away."
Mickey appears to tear-up slightly as he ponders the grim years.
"I remember this ham came up to me once - some Guido who'd played a few gangsters on TV - and said: 'What happened to you? You had it all.' The guy was a greaseball, but there was truth in what he said."
Sure enough, Mickey Rourke was one of the hottest actors of the 1980s. With his engagingly mischievous smile and his sweet, melodious voice, Rourke brought blue-collar charm to such well-remembered films as Diner, Rumblefish and The Pope of Greenwich Village. When he wheeled out his perfectly articulated mumble for Barfly, a few overheated critics allowed themselves to believe that they were looking at the new Brando.
For a decade or two it seemed as if that assessment might have been all too prescient. Rourke's decline in the 1990s was every bit as grisly as that experienced by Brando in his twilight years.
Following a series of embarrassing flops - Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, anybody? - Mickey took up professional boxing and, despite avoiding defeat, saw both his face and his reputation get steadily demolished. When a doctor told him that he risked serious brain damage if he didn't hang up his gloves, he obliged and found himself washed up in two distinct careers.
"I remember I had this motorcycle collection," he says. "I had all these bikes custom-designed and every few months I would have to sell one to pay rent. I had a friend who would give me $200 every now and then for food. And I would just sit in this apartment that was the size of this room. I wouldn't have people round, because I just didn't want people to see how I was living."
The sad fact is that we have been living with this version of Mickey Rourke for far longer than we lived with the pretty young movie idol. For close to 20 years he has been the unhappy target of snide jokes, whereas the golden times lasted only seven or eight years.
"I remember that at one stage I thought, if I make a few changes, I can get back in about five years, but it actually took about 14. I was living on gas fumes and hope and you can go a surprisingly long way on that."
He looks somewhat less strange in the flesh than he appears on screen. His face, messed up by plastic surgery and other people's fists, is a tad less puffy than you might expect. His eyes are clear and he speaks in fluent, well-constructed sentences.
Rourke is, of course, currently in the happy position of promoting a hugely lauded, conspicuously garlanded art-house hit. So it's little wonder he seems a tad sparkier than one might have feared. Darren Aronofsky, director of Requiem for a Dream, has drawn an extraordinary performance from Rourke and the world has taken due notice. Last autumn, The Wrestler won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and on Sunday Rourke will attend the Golden Globes as a nominee for best actor. Most Oscar pundits view the year's best actor contest as a two-horse race between our hero and (for the fine Milk) Sean Penn.
"We had to make the film for a teeny-weeny budget, because it starred me rather than a movie star," he snorts. "We got that Golden Lion or whatever it's called. We got all those good reviews from intellectuals. But when the old wrestling legends said they liked it that was most important to me. The fact that Rick Flair and Roddy Piper liked it was very moving."
I would guess that, as a former professional boxer, he must have been slightly snitty about the superficial world of wrestling. I mean it's not real. Is it? "Oh no. I didn't have any respect for that world - none at all. I wasn't dying to play a wrestler. After a few months and a few trips to the hospital, I changed my mind, though. There were these old wrestlers turning up at the premiere who can't tie their shoelaces any more. That's a very tough world."
It hardly needs to be said that the role has autobiographical resonances for Rourke. Like the actor, Randy enjoyed his golden years in the 1980s. The film finds him battling heart disease, romancing a pole dancer and trying to re-establish relations with his estranged daughter. Both the Ram and Mickey are poignantly honest about the mistakes they made during the Bon Jovi years.
"Sure. I talk about it," Rourke says. "What do I care? Only the man upstairs can judge me." So what were the roots of his self-destructive urges? Even before his bizarre decision to return to boxing, he had already established a reputation for biting the heads off directors and turning down the best roles in town. (He said no to leading parts in Rain Man, The Untouchables and 48 Hours.)
"It all had to do with the fact that I had issues with authority from an early age," he says. "I had issues with abandonment and parenting. Just shameful issues." He has spoken in earlier interviews about the abuse he suffered from a violent stepfather. Born in New York, Rourke moved with his mother to Florida when he was a young child. It was there the misery began.
"I don't even want to talk about that," he says. "But I got hard physically and mentally. It's all about respect. If you touch my girl on the ass you will get a punch in the face. I didn't know what it meant to be responsible and consistent. It took the experience of the last 20 years for me to learn that."
Rourke, now 56, took up boxing as a kid, but, during a lay-off following an injury, he was drawn into a production of a Jean Genet play and fast developed a taste for this less violent pastime. He first caught cinemagoers' attention playing an eccentric incendiary expert in Lawrence Kasdan's 1981 pseudo-noir Body Heat. (Characteristically, the young unknown almost lost the role when he demanded that his pay be doubled from $500 to $1,000 a day.) Then came more prominent parts in Barry Levinson's Diner and Francis Ford Coppola's Rumblefish.
His incessantly flappy mouth continued to attract adverse publicity. In 1987 he played an IRA man in Mike Hodges's iffy thriller A Prayer for the Dying and began to identify himself with the Provos. It is said that he got an IRA tattoo and that he donated his income from a later film to "the cause".
"Oh yeah, yeah, yeah," he says, wagging his head wryly. "I am not talking about that. Hey, I can't even hear what you are asking me. What's that? Look, I got carried away in a role. I was immature and got carried away with the research. I was advised not to do it by Richard Harris. He said it would be trouble and I should have listened to him. Look, if I was doing a cowboy and Indian film, I would have researched that. It was just very bad timing. I look back and think: yeah, I should have listened to Richard Harris."
Rourke admits that a fondness for the booze and for other less legal stimulants played a part in his self-destruction. The chaotic dissolution of his marriage to the actress Carré Otis - his co-star in the hideous soft-porn extravaganza Wild Orchid - still seems to be a source of regret. Yet, for all his marital and chemical troubles, it is still puzzling that he could have gone through so much money in such a short time. In the mid-1980s he was a multi-millionaire. Ten years later he was destitute. That's an awful lot of booze, pills and alimony.
"Oh yeah. Millions vanished," he says. "Look, if you get that sort of money and you've never had it before, you spend it with both hands. Suddenly a lot of guys you don't know are managing your money. I didn't even know their names." There is one crucial difference between Randy the Ram and Mickey Rourke. For once, it is real life rather than the movies that offers a possibility of redemption and happy endings. Whereas the wrestler's story is one of continued decline, the actor's career is very definitely on an upward trajectory.
Sitting on a sofa in his favourite London hotel, his aged Chihuahua curled up beside him, Mickey Rourke can congratulate himself on making the challenging journey from matinee idol to washed-up loser and onwards to charismatic character actor. In age of drab, well-behaved, faceless movie idols, he radiates the kind of grubby, frayed magnetism that can only come from hard experience.
Still, despite his continuing faith in a Catholic god, he must carry around the fear that he could slip back down the greasy pole at any time. Does he have nightmares about being back on Skid Row? "There is no way that could happen," he says. "Because I have put the hard work in. If you don't do the hard work you end up standing there with your finger in your ass looking silly. I have done the work. I have looked silly for 14 years. And that won't happen again." If that guy - the Guido - came up to him in the five and dime today, he claims he would show patience. He no longer has the urge to talk with his fists.
"Yeah, I finally know it's not a sign of weakness to not be a hard man." So, when challenged in that manner, he now stops, takes a deep breath and counts to 10? "Well, maybe to seven. Ha, ha, ha!"
It's good to have you back, Mickey.
The Wrestleropens next Friday
Born again: the stars who came in from the cold
The Wrestleroffers us two distinct comebacks. After 15 years making bad films for Tony Scott and worse films for Derek P Nobody, Mickey Rourke delivers a performance that, unless a meteor strikes Hollywood, will secure the veteran an Oscar nomination.
Following the critical drubbing handed out to The Fountain, director Darren Aronofskyalso needed some love and now he has it in abundance. But who has had the most dramatic comeback in Hollywood?
Ben Affleckthe actor was the butt of jokes until Ben Affleck the director secured spiffing reviews for Gone Baby Gone.
Robert Downey Jrsurvived jail and an addiction to everything from beer to Brasso to deliver admired performances in smashes such as Iron Man and Tropic Thunder.
John Travoltawas making films featuring talking babies when Quentin Tarantinore-invented him for Pulp Fiction. (Ironically, following the Grindhousefiasco, Tarantino, who also salvaged the careers of such stars as Robert Forster, Pam Grierand David Carradine,now requires a bit of rescuing himself.)
Gloria Swansonhad made only one film in the previous 16 years when Billy Wilder propelled her into the untouchable Sunset Boulevard.
Bette Daviswas doing mediocre telly when Robert Aldrich persuaded her to make with the scowls in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?But it could be argued that the most effective comeback was so complete we have to be reminded that the star in question ever fell out of favour.
From Here to Eternityconvinced the world that Frank Sinatra,whose singing career was then stalling, could really act and launched the great man towards immortality.
