Mickey Rourke
Interview
MICKEY ROURKE
Barfly (1987)
Interview
BY
Nick Pinkerton
From the vault: Nick Pinkerton pays a visit to Comeback Tour-era Mickey Rourke at home in the West Village with his miniature dogs.
Barfly plays 7 Ludlow beginning on Friday, October 6 as part of Robby Müller: Remain in Light.
Fifteen years ago, I made my one and only foray into “celebrity profile” writing, which I consider to be the absolute lowest of literary genres, because I needed the bread, and because I wanted to meet Mickey Rourke, who was then doing the media rounds for his 2008 The Wrestler. The published piece, for perfectly understandable reasons, differed significantly from my submitted draft, though also for perfectly understandable reasons, I always preferred my version. So, on the occasion of Metrograph’s screening of nonpareil Rourke vehicle Barfly (1987), I’ve exhumed this late aughts time capsule from the vaults.—Nick Pinkerton
*
You have to figure Mickey Rourke is making decent money again, but the TV in his West Village pad is about the same size as mine, no wall-swallowing plasma behemoth. As we talk, the second half of the Southeastern Conference game between the Florida Gators and Alabama Crimson Tide plays on it in the background, muted.
The living room, where we sit down, is dominated by an enormous glass-top coffee table piled with odd ephemera: a movie theater-sized bag of Starbursts, a pair of rhinestone-bejeweled handcuffs, a big Julian Schnabel hardcover (signed), three packs of Marlboros (which Rourke is in and out of), an antique percussion-cap pistol, a tray filled with prescription medicaments (presumably for the pack of geriatric miniature dogs Rourke keeps, sprawled around the pee pad-strewn room), a single bottle of Corona (which I am offered and graciously accept)... There’s an element of stage dressing to the setup—you’re seeing just exactly as much as you’re supposed to see, a tease of innocuous bad-boy bachelor accessories. The room’s blocked off from the rest of the apartment by two big sliding doors, beyond which his publicist lurks, popping in as needed to keep him on schedule—in recent weeks he’s been holding court for a parade of journos here, and his Comeback Tour is a well-oiled machine.
Rourke’s movie The Wrestler is about to come out. It’s being sold as the once garishly troubled Rourke’s return to form film—though he hasn’t been really gone for a while, has in fact been indefatigably crawling back toward stardom, Hugh Glass-like, for a little over a decade now (not coincidentally, he’s been in therapy for the same period of time), contritely assuring interviewers that he’s “fallen in love with acting again” with each dawning press day.
The saga of Mickey Rourke began when Philip Andre Rourke, Jr. realized that “actor” was a real job that real people actually had while watching A Place in the Sun (1951) in a high school English class. “There was something about Montgomery Clift… it’s the first time I watched somebody like, and I really fuckin’ felt for the guy, you know? Cause he wants to be with Elizabeth Taylor and he can’t wait to fuckin’ get rid of Shelley Winters…” A friend at the University of Miami (“the smallest noseguard on the planet”) got him his first part, playing Green Eyes in a stage production of Jean Genet’s Deathwatch. A seed of ambition was planted.
Diner (1982)
Rourke came North from native Miami, got a room in the Marlton Hotel on West 8th St.—walking distance from his present New York digs—where he befriended the switchboard operator, a theater buff named Carl Montgomery, and thereby gained a mentor. He has been back in New York City for four years now, back where he fell in love with acting the first time around as a student at the Actors Studio. He gave himself five years to “make it” once he’d started studying acting in earnest, and he didn’t. It was Mike Nichols, he says, who pointed him toward movies.
Maybe what Nichols saw in Rourke was an attentive, fondling, close-up actor who lost his greatest attributes when he was projecting towards the balcony. The first sizable part was in Body Heat (1981), as an oleaginous expert in illicit incendiary devices; the bona fide breakthrough in the ensemble of Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982) as “Boogie” Sheftell, Baltimore hairdresser, compulsive gambler, and working-class dandy. Levinson’s ensemble comedy is a not-entirely nostalgic revisitation of the ’50s of the director’s youth, a Chesapeake Bay I Vitelloni (1953) reflecting on the vast gulfs placed between young men and women in that world of yesterday—the ’80s were big on Eisenhower-era flashbacks, and Rourke’s thigh-grinding angst and rockabilly pompadour were tailor-made. Boogie’s girl-crazy, but he sees and respects their curiosity about sex in a way his buddies don’t, which makes him something more than a one-note lothario. There’s a scene in the movie that should, by all rights, be dire: on a date at the movies, Boogie slips his dick into a popcorn box to sucker the girl he’s with into grabbing his pecker. So far, so Porky’s (1981)—but then it’s Rourke’s turn to explain himself, and he slowly cools her off with his diaphanous rap, laying down lines as though he’s tucking her in, until, against her better judgement, she’s charmed out of her huff, because how could anyone stay mad at Boogie?
This extraordinary intimate solicitousness made Rourke a star: the way he always seems to be so involved with whoever he’s talking to that he couldn’t be bothered to strike effects for an imagined audience. He’s too sweet to be real—and he often isn’t, but even if you should know better he’s gonna use that tiptoe voice and pursed, naughty grin to sell his ass to you. That tenderness is ingrained, stayed even as Rourke tried to sweat it out in the weight room, descending into semi-parodic Bad White Boy machismo (by 1990’s Desperate Hours the kind, knowing smirk is a homicidal front). How else to explain how a guy who very publicly suicided his career could be allowed a second act? The man is a sweet talker nonpareil. As an interviewee, Rourke is courteous beyond belief, plying me with Life Savers and that Corona—if anyone asked, I’d tell them he’s a “genuinely good dude,” and I’d believe it, even though… what do I know?
Desperate Hours (1990)
I liked Rourke’s new movie more than I expected, although not half as much as Mickey likes it. He is on the screen almost constantly in it, in the role of Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a ring celebrity 20 years past his peak popularity, reduced to picking up shifts at the grocery store loading dock and headlining weekend gigs in armories on the New Jersey indie circuit. It has the focus on past-his-prime attrition of the ’70s feel-bad sports films (1972’s Fat City, 1979’s North Dallas Forty). It sometimes brushes the morbid fascination of those reality TV shows where some fallen-on-hard-times celeb offers themself up to docu-mockery, a shameful paychecking penitence we feel we’re owed for the years of easy money and endless partying, as well as an ennobled recollection of the tabloid personal tragedies of real wrestlers: Jake “The Snake” Roberts, “Flyin’ Brian” Pillman, “Macho Man” Randy Savage. The Wrestler has a lock on the desperate masochism of degraded working-class American manhood, a milieu where the only thing left to take pride in sometimes is how much punishment you can absorb. (Aronofsky seems to have become enamored of the theme: his slated film, The Fighter, is a proposed biopic of granite-chinned blue-collar boxer “Irish” Micky Ward.)
Rourke knows something about testing his toughness to the point of self-annihilation, and it’s obvious he identifies heavily with “broken-down piece of meat” The Ram: “There’s that time in your life when you’re a younger man, and you’re wrestling in front of 60,000 people in Madison Square Garden and then, you know, 15, 20 years go by and you’re ‘I used to be’… one time you were a number one draft pick, and then next thing they do they put you on waivers.”
Tim Tebow connects for a pass touchdown on the TV, which gives the Gators a lead, and briefly takes Rourke off topic. (“Fuckin’ A, go, Florida, go! Fuck that [Nick] Saban. Goes to the Dolphins for a year…”) From here he pivots to the De La Hoya vs. Pacquiao bout coming up later that night; Mickey says he visited the PacMan’s camp a couple weeks ago to watch him train. “Manny’s got a chance to win the fight,” he says, “if he sets a fast pace, if he doesn’t get caught… if it goes under five, Oscar, over five, Manny.” (The fight goes eight, and he’s right.)
A high school jock by his own description, Rourke is uncommonly attached to using a vocabulary of sports metaphors to talk about practically everything:
Everything with me is competitive… y’know, down in Miami we have real good sports programs, at a real high level and… and it was all about winning, fuckin’ second place is goddamn last place—and you’re doing a scene with somebody this guy’s got a reputation, he’s really good, well… Let’s bring it, you know? On one hand, it could be really good ’cause if you’re working with somebody who really is good, you work together… but if you work with somebody who wants to act all by yourself and dust you, then I’ll turn on the dust and I’ll blow your ass away, alright?
He remembers showing up to the first day of shooting for Body Heat: “I think William Hurt was the star of the movie, and I was thinking (with a dismissing pfft), ‘If this is it, man, this is gonna be easy.’” And for a while, Rourke made it look that way; I’d put his run through the ’80s up against any streak by any American actor during the same period. The movies weren’t uniform masterpieces, but Rourke was consistently engaged-yet-relaxed, and consistently taking calls from interesting or at least ambitious directors: Levinson, Cimino (three-and-a-half times), Alan Parker, Francis Ford Coppola, Adrian Lyne, Nic Roeg, Barbet Schroeder...
The Wrestler (2008)
I wonder if Rourke’s hard-on for competition had something to do with what came next—if, having plateaued professionally and dominated (in his own mind, at least) the William Hurts of the world, he started to get bored, the pursuit having proved more stimulating than the prize. I mention the upset victory of James “Buster” Douglas over Mike Tyson, how Tyson looked distracted and sluggish during the bout, like he was sick of being the best, wasn’t hungry, just didn’t want to do it anymore.
Mickey doesn’t buy my amateur psychoanalysis of Tyson, for starters (“there were a lot of things prior to the fight that led up to that…”) and he says he never got bored, just run-down by childhood demons, sick, mad. “Coming from the Actors Studio from the last days of Strasberg, [acting] was something precious to me.” So why quit? He brings up “The Gray,” his vague catchall for every betrayal of the art-for-art’s-sake idealism he brought to the clock-punching dream factories out West:
Okay, if you’re playing ball… There’s a winner, there’s a loser, there’s—you know who’s good, you know who’s not good… With acting there’s a lot of politics, there’s a lot of hype, there’s a lot of, uh… what’s it called when somebody’s famous and then their son or daughter or you marry somebody and you become—nepotism, there’s a lot of nepotism… Y’know, so-and-so marries so-and-so and now all the sudden she’s got a fuckin’ career, doesn’t mean she can fuckin’ act. But yet she’ll get offered every big fuckin’ movie around cuz she married so-and-so… The Gray made me furious…
Whenever Rourke wades deep into shit-talking The Industry, he quickly backtracks and is careful to also blame himself for his own former unaccountability, like a catechism. He’s says he’s cured what was ailing him with psychiatry and Catholicism—though I suspect he still self-identifies a little with the Christ who rampaged through the temple roaring, “Make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise.”
The movies got dodgier, Rourke got seedier, his screen persona increasingly taking on the air of a depressed gigolo on the grind, slipping on the pleather jacket for another buck:
I went through the whole number everybody does when they get money for the first time in their life, that never had any money, went and bought a big house I couldn’t afford, cars I shouldn’t a had, an entourage of jerkoffs around me and, uh, I would sit a year or two or three years waitin’ for the perfect director, the perfect script, and then all the sudden, “How the fuck am I gonna pay off a $25,000 a month mortgage?”
Rourke had played a boxer before, a punch-drunk cowboy in 1988’s Homeboy—one of a handful of screenplays Rourke wrote. He decided not long after to play one in the ring for real, splitting LA for Miami’s 5th Street Gym. Fighting as a light heavyweight, he banged away with a succession of journeymen and palookas, winning the eternal enmity of Miami Herald sportswriters. Aspersions were cast on his character; doubts were raised about his claims to a vaunted amateur boxing career in his youth and his having grown up in the majority-black Liberty City neighborhood; he was ridiculed as the phoniest Miami “street” white boy since Robert Van Winkle rapped “Shay with a gauge and Vanilla with a nine.” He went to court—for his own arrests, and to watch the Gotti trial. He was friends with Tupac Shakur, his co-star in Julien Temple’s 1996 Bullet and another actor-tough guy who was carrying on like he’d never left the set of Juice (1992) until the day he died. He went from being taken for the reincarnation of James Dean to the second coming of George Raft—famous for turning down good parts and consorting with lowlife hoods. He co-starred with Dennis Rodman and Jean-Claude Van Damme in Tsui Hark’s Double Team (1997), which is actually quite enjoyable, but not the sort of thing likely to impress the Academy.
And then came the long road back. It hasn’t escaped attention that, along the way, Rourke changed, that, per The Ram’s goodbye monologue, he “ain’t as pretty as [he] used to be.” Celeb-watchers attribute plastic surgery run amok, Rourke pleads facial rearrangement by way of the Sweet Science. (“I had my nose broke, operated on four times, right cheekbone once…”) Whatever the case, he undertook a new career with a new mug—a bit like his idol Monty Clift after the car accident during the shoot of Raintree County (1957) that immobilized the left side of his million-dollar face. Two decades ago, Rourke was already eager, like many a pretty boy thespian, to efface his angelic looks: he puffed his belly and took on toothachy jowls to channel Charles Bukowski in Barfly (the performance is a gas, Marlon Brando doing a W.C. Fields impression). And his face is at the crux of Walter Hill’s 1989 Johnny Handsome, in which Rourke plays a deformed New Orleans thug who receives massive reconstructive surgery in prison, a kind of pulp The Elephant Man (1980) with Rourke enormously moving performing his character’s anguished rebirth out of a cocoon of bandages and subsequent shy attempts to adapt himself to normal, straight-and-narrow life.
Body Heat (1981)
The Wrestler is second-skin fitted to the knotty, mashed, pumped-up, ragged Rourke of today. It presupposes a knowledge of his personal history to magnify the film’s melancholy, the way Jimmy Dunn, well known to have been a sweet-souled New York-Irish drunk in life, breaks your heart in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) playing a sweet-souled New York-Irish drunk who can’t get out of the bottom of the bottle. The movie is a showcase of everything that Mickey can (still) do—and being made subservient to a performance tames director Aronofsky’s hyperbolic stylization. Heaving off the turnstiles, Rourke boasts his athleticism. His off-the-cuff clowning with customers at the supermarket deli counter makes you buy the “fell in love with acting again” line. The close-ups are sparing, but there’s one where Rourke bats two synchronized tears down his cheeks that’s nothing short of devastating Above all, it both suits the swollen strangeness of present-day Rourke and returns something of the feminine side of his persona that had been purged in his rough-and-tumble ’90s, emphasizing The Ram’s actorly vanity, his rounds of tanning bed, locker-room steroid buys, peroxiding salon visits (It is worth noting that one of Rourke’s best recent-ish roles was as a transgender prisoner in Steve Buscemi’s 2000 Animal Factory). Randy dearly misses the femme-macho glam-prissy arena hair metal of his heyday—he doesn’t have the frame of reference to see The Crüe as a billion-dollar marketing scheme peer-pressured onto the public by a combine of corporate interests much like the one that abandoned him when his salability failed, leaving him a mutant with chronic back pain and a crispy perm. It’s just the soundtrack to the halcyon days when the silicone tits fell right into his lap.
Rourke’s a better self-salesman, but his toolkit as an actor has diminished. He’s bull-necked, the old acne scars smoothed over around the time of the first big paydays, the prim, secretive smile all but gone. His face, once palpitatingly sensitive, has regained some of its elasticity, and he’s still got those beseeching eyes, though somewhat less prominent over his swollen, brick-red reconstructed cheekbones. It’s as if Rourke wanted to handicap himself, like a high school slugger teaching himself to counterintuitively bat from the other side of the plate—but most likely he wasn’t thinking ahead. He says he’s more “focused” as an actor now. I bring up something Orson Welles said about the way age and girth concentrated him by limiting what he could do, and Mickey seems to dig it: “I like that. Yeah, a fat guy can’t play skinny.”
So what can Mickey still play? He’s optimistic about the future—gamely slips in a plug for the movie he’s been shooting, Géla Babluani’s English-language remake of his arthouse thriller 13 Tzameti [13, 2010], because he’s on a mission to get the word out that he’s all business, has the drive and the temperament to keep himself working, and that the only nostalgia he’ll cop to is for the days of the Joe Robbie-owned Dolphins.
Rourke will keep getting gigs after The Wrestler if he wants them—but it’s going to be harder for him to find interesting ones, to not get stuck playing a parade of action movie heavies. But then it’s difficult to imagine what the career of the heartthrob Rourke of 1981 would look like if he were starting out today: sex is out of fashion at the multiplex, and so are the sort of seedy thrillers suited to his peculiar unsavory glamour. In all likelihood he’d have wound up spending a lot of time in front of a green screen. Rourke has had his bad breaks through the years but, in having escaped this fate, he must be counted a lucky man.
The Gators are marching their way to victory behind the Christian warrior Tebow as I wrap up with Rourke. As I start to show myself out he asks where I’m going to watch the De La Hoya vs. Pacquiao fight, which may or may not be an invite; at any rate I have a date, and tell him that, to which he says, “Good for you,” and then, with a note of facetious self-pity, “Wish I had a date.” This doesn’t necessarily say anything about Rourke the man, but it says something about the qualities of Rourke the actor, because on the way out I really fuckin’ felt for the guy.
Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-based writer focused on moving image-based art; his writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Artforum, Frieze, Reverse Shot, The Guardian, 4Columns, The Baffler, Rhizome, Harper’s, and the Village Voice. He is the editor of Bombast magazine, editor-at-large of Metrograph Journal, and maintains a Substack, Employee Picks. Publications include monographs on Mondo movies (True/False) and the films of Ruth Beckermann (Austrian Film Museum), a book on Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Fireflies Press), and a forthcoming critical biography of Jean Eustache (The Film Desk). The Sweet East, a film from his original screenplay directed by Sean Price Williams, premiered in the Quinzaine des Cinéastes section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
An earlier version of this interview was originally published in Flaunt Magazine #101, January 2009.
Barfly (1987)
