Lord of the Ring

Anyone who has met Mickey Rourke will tell you the exact same thing; Mickey Rourke cries during interviews. He cries for departed friends. He cries for dead pets. He cries for all those years that he’ll never get back. Knowing this, however, does not make it any less moving when you see it happen.

Today, sitting in his favourite boutique London hotel, Loki, his faithful 17 year-old pug by his side, he’s talking about George Best when the tears first appear.
“Look at Maradona,” says Rourke. “It’s the same for him. There are guys who just fuck up when they’re not able to do what they were born to do. Look at Georgie Best. Georgie and I were great friends. But I don’t think he was ever truly happy off that football pitch.”
He nods and repeats himself as his eyes brim with tears.
“Georgie Best was a friend of mine.”
These are emotional times for Mickey Rourke. For more than a decade he could scarcely get hired to take out the garbage in Hollywood. Now, on the back of his tremendous performance in The Wrestler, the 56-year-old is an early bookies’ favourite to take home the Academy Award for Best Actor.
“I am very, very, very proud of this movie,” he says, tears welling up once more. “It’s the hardest movie I’ve ever made. It’s the best movie I’ve ever made.”
This is almost certainly true. In recent years, as the Gen X kids who learned the facts of life watching 9 ½ Weeks came of age and started making movies, Rourke has found hip cameo roles in the likes of Spun and Sin City. The Wrestler, a vehicle that’s been tailored and thrashed out between director Darren Aronofsky and Rourke (the outré filmmaker’s unlikely muse), marks a far more significant comeback.
Mickey Rourke, as anyone who has been conscious during the last two decades might tell you, knows precisely what a kicking feels like. Long before he got to Hollywood and the corruptions of celebrity, he was a troubled soul. Born in New York into Irish-American stock, the young Mickey’s difficulties started when his mother remarried and relocated the brood to Miami. His new stepfather (“a real brutal man”) was abusive and while Mickey found some solace in boxing, it was not enough to offset the psychological trauma of what was happening at home.
“It left me with no idea about consequences,” he says. “I sort of brought the rules from where I came from with me. But they weren’t rules that work in the real world. I had a real problem with authority figures my whole life. I had no clue how to take instruction.”
After receiving a concussion during a Florida Golden Gloves bout, Mickey found himself killing time in a Jean Genet play. He loved it. He threw himself into his new profession completely, took lessons in the Actor’s Studio and moved to Los Angeles. He quickly landed a small part in Steven Spielberg’s 1941 but it was his moody turn in 1981’s Body Heat that put him on the map.
Overnight, he became one of the most sensational stars on the planet. It was not just the sterling craft he brought to films like Diner, Rumble Fish and The Outsiders. Here was an icon, a moody, dangerous maverick, a sex symbol, a wild man. Here was the next Marlon Brando.
“People say you’re the next this and the next that,” says Rourke. “But who cares? Go and lookup the next this and the next that. Even when it turns out good that doesn’t mean they have the greatest lives. Doesn’t mean they’re happy. Errol Flynn, Monty Clift weren’t exactly happy campers, you know what I mean?”
Still, the comparison with Marlon Brando is hardly a facile one. Like Brando and very, very few others since, Rourke seems to embody the extremities of masculinity and femininity simultaneously, hard and fierce, yet soft and yielding. He was perfect for Hollywood product during the ‘80s when sentiment and brawn reigned. “Yep,” he smiles. “I had a career for a while. For maybe more than five years. Then I self-destructed. Bang.”
His implosion was swift and spectacular. He made appalling career choices, opting for roles in Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man while turning down parts in Rain Man, The Silence of the Lambs, Top Gun and Pulp Fiction. His marriage to the model-turned-actress Carrie Otis was consummated in heroin and played out in tabloid clichés. By the time the couple’s soft-porn pet-project Wild Orchid surfaced in 1990 Mickey Rourke was a sad, pathetic joke.
When the marriage dissolved, Rourke would spend 10 years calling Otis late at night. He was in bad shape. The tough guy network – Sean Penn, Vincent Gallo – kept him in supporting parts.
“Los Angeles is the worst place in the world to be a failure,” he says. “You have your face rubbed in it everyday. Everyday you’re reminded that you’re no longer important and no longer wanted. If it was one in the morning and I went to a seven eleven to buy a pack of cigarettes, there was always some guy – a real idiot – who goes “Hey, didn’t you used to be in the movies?” Then he’ll go naming all the wrong movies and calling me the wrong names. And I’m thinking, Christ get me out of here.”
He returned to Florida and took up boxing again. He made some money, around $1million a year by his count, but his face was destroyed. Today, sitting across from me with chin length highlights and a goatee, he looks better than he has done for a decade, but you can still see a mess of reconstructive surgery scars. It would not take Sigmund Freud to see the significance of a once beautiful man punishing himself to this degree.
“I knew the things that had happened to me,” he says. “I figured out why I behaved the way I did but I didn’t really have a grasp on it. Change was not something I wanted. I thought that if I changed I wouldn’t be such a hard man anymore. It was good to be a hard man. I had built up an enormous amount of armour, physically and mentally. But that toughness and will was really only hiding broken pieces. I was ashamed. I felt abandoned. It’s easier to walk around feeling hard than it is to walk around feeling small.”
This fragility is writ large in The Wrestler. The film, which was written by The Onion’s Robert Seigel, was to have been a vehicle for Nic Cage when director Darren Aronofsky happened upon Rourke as an alternative choice. Mr. Cage graciously stepped aside on his old pal’s behalf.
It’s difficult to imagine how the film would have worked had it been any other way. A simple Rocky construction built around Rourke’s performance as Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson, a washed-up ‘80s superstar wrestler, there is so much of the actor in the character it can make for overwhelming viewing.
“Well, wrestling and acting are pretty similar when you think about it,” says Rourke. “Like acting, there’s a lot of politics involved. There are people who control you. People who pull strings. Let’s say you’re at the top of your game. Let’s say you’re in your late 30s or early 40s and somebody decides, well, we’ve seen enough of you. Like a footballer, they trade you to another team like a sack of sugar. And all of a sudden you’re not a headliner in Madison Square Gardens, you’re in small arenas and halls. It’s pretty much impossible for a wrestler to come back.”
He pauses.
“There’s something else. The issue of abandonment. You’re on the road so much that you’re not taking care of your family and your responsibilities. Then after the lights go out everybody’s gone. Honest to God, when I see the film I want him to die.”
Given certain uncanny resemblances between Rourke and Randy, I’m a little distressed to hear this last remark. The star is quick to assure me, however, that he’s still in the game.
“Randy doesn’t have accessibility to people who can help,” says Rourke. “When I had nothing, when I was at my lowest, I found the right person to talk to, the right couple of people to talk to. I’ve earned my way back. I’ve worked hard to change. You’d have to be here for a month for me to tell you. It was all little baby steps. It took a year or ten. I had to be accountable. I really didn’t understand what it was to be accountable. There are still times when I’ll take a little step back, but I’ll pick myself up and take a step and a half forward five minutes later. I’m not going back to the old ways. No way. I don’t want to be in the seven-eleven again.”

The Wrestler is released January 16