(Joel Ryan/AP Photo)
It’s a shock to meet Mickey Rourke in the flesh and it’s the flesh that does the shocking. At first glimpse he might be the victim of a fallen facelift. The surgeons have been at him four times, reconstructing his much-mashed nose and fixing his once high and handsome cheekbones. In a sense his injuries were self-inflicted, because he gave up a Hollywood career to become a professional boxer at the perilous age of 34. He was 40, and facing serious brain damage, when he finally quit. One surgeon did a Mike Tyson on him by nicking a bit of his ear, but with the justification of using it to rebuild the nose.
He has given as good as he has got, once getting fired from a film for punching a heroin dealer. “I hit him harder than anybody in my life,” he says. “He was out before he hit the ground. I hit an artery and there was a stream of blood that went 20ft into the air.”
Rourke has remorse about many things, but hitting this man who was trying to trade with his then addicted former wife is not one of them. In fact he still displays the pride in a good deed done, the more so because the incident ended his involvement with a film he didn’t want to be doing anyway. “I wasn’t crazy about who I was working with. Already they were asking me, ‘Are you going to be giving us trouble?’, and it really pissed me off.”
These and other war stories from his time in boxing and the movies are told with a disconcerting softness. He has a furry, tender baritone and, as with Tyson, there is an awful mismatch between the vulnerability of his speech and the violence he has committed. A few years ago this tension would have come across like the lull before a storm, because a storm is what was coming; his directors were alienated and his friends terrified. Today, after 14 intense, expensive years of therapy, it can still create anxiety in the surrounding air, as can a pitbull that you are assured is perfectly safe.
Before taking up professional boxing, he had turned in some memorable film performances, including the Motorcycle Boy in Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish (1983) and the alluring deviant in 9½ Weeks; in the second he became the envy of his sex through a long and steamy scene with Kim Basinger. But then she became the envy of hers, too, for it confirmed Rourke’s status as a true Hollywood heart-throb, the new James Dean, one who seemed to have turned the abuses and appetites of a shocking early life to sexy, dangerous account on screen.
Now, at what must be 52, although he doesn’t declare his age, he has finished a film called The Wrestler. It may not be billed as a biography of him, yet it eerily shadows the damage, the triumphs and the degradations of his own life. Because he is Mickey Rourke not Robert De Niro, and because wrestling is the flashy relation of boxing’s noble art, the project can fairly be described as a tabloid Raging Bull. He says himself that, “It was a sport I looked down on as fake and theatrical. My half-brothers used to go and watch it all the time and think it was real, but I couldn’t stand the f***ing sport. I had a terrible disdain for it.”
He seems to flout the film-promoting etiquette still further when he describes the script he received as mediocre. He insisted on rewriting all his own dialogue. The producers wanted him so much for the title role of the mangy ring lion trying to resurrect his career that they went along with his demands. As a result the story of Randy “The Ram” Robinson acquired dark patches and tragic subplots straight from Rourke’s experience. When he was boxing professionally, he was just three bouts away from a world title shot. Now, as an actor once again, he sees this comeback parable as the trade’s equivalent of a championship bid. He is rarely off the screen; he has not even devolved his moves to a stuntman; he is the heart and soul of the thing. Nothing in his irregular life has had so much riding on it.
“The producer [Darren Aronofsky] told me: ‘If I do this with you, you must do everything I say. You must not disrespect me. If you have something to say to me, don’t embarrass me in front of the crew. And I can’t pay you.’ He has a lot of balls. I like this man. He’s telling me the ground rules. He said no going out to clubs in the evening. I’d been with him up till that point! He insisted on me doing three months’ training. I got into some research – I used to walk around at 195lb. Fighting, I would get down to 168. I was a super-middleweight.
“I thought, ‘OK, 195lb’. Then I looked at these wrestlers and I thought, ‘Hmmm’. In six months I went from 195 to 230. This was solid muscle. I hired a trainer from the Israeli Army and he was very strict. We trained twice a day with heavy weights, and my eating habits became super-high protein, low carbs and, let’s say, a lot of vitamins.”
Because of his reputation for hellraising as a young man, people assumed his behaviour was drink-fuelled. When you learn that his family is doused in booze, with a great-grandfather, grandfather, father and uncles all dying young from alcohol, it hardens the conviction. But it is false. He’s done his share of drinking but, he insists, that was never the problem. Strange perhaps, given that he’s such a compulsive character, whether it’s a woman he can’t get out of his head – like his second wife, Carré Otis – or punishing his tall, athletic body into shape, or the packet of Marlboro still at his elbow. But no, the real culprit is anger itself: the permanent, ever-ready sort that can flare with no provocation. Rourke is hardly alone in having such a reservoir of rage, but fame made his temper conspicuous. He hit headlines as hard as he hit opponents. He even tried to cut off his little finger because he couldn’t see the use for it. Today he nods wearily and accepts that the public interest in him was as much for his notoriety as for his acting.
To ask why this anger is there is like asking why the weather is as it is. You can go into cold fronts and depressions and so on, but ultimately the weather is the weather. That is how it was with Rourke. He does touch on the subject, and almost seems to have an explanation for it. This has to do with a physically abusive family member who was evidently a massive presence in Rourke’s childhood in a tough neighbourhood of Miami. Several times he seems about to embark on a full explanation of how this man’s behaviour affected him, but then pulls back from the brink with an exasperated wiping motion of his hand. It turns out not to be what you might expect, but you have to wait a while. As he is struggling with it, and saying that he doesn’t really talk about it, his eyes well and dry repeatedly.
This continues as he talks of the younger brother, Joe, who died in his arms after a 25-year struggle with cancer that had started in his late teens. It goes on happening as he remembers his ex-wife Carré, who has left her mark on him as graphically as the fighting. He has her name on his arm and her face on his back. They met in 1990 on the set of Wild Orchid. Rourke found the film forgettable, but not her.
“I have never met anyone like that in my life. Oh God. She was my thunder and lightning. We weren’t fire and ice, but fire and fire. The two of us were out of control. She left me 13 years ago and since then I have never had dinner twice with the same girl in a week.
“You know, she was a victim of her own family for several years. She was one of the most beautiful women God ever created, but deep down inside she felt like a rag doll.”
For her part, Carré Otis said in an interview three years after the end of their marriage that the relationship had been so turbulent that “at one point I just wanted to stay alive”. It was not him she feared so much as the thought that she might kill herself. Rourke could be “amazing and talented”, said the former Revlon model, but then fall into “periods of being terribly violent”.
His eyes brim again and his face wrestles with itself as he says he heard some news about her a couple of days before. “She’s off drugs, she got into that Buddhist yoga crap, she moved on. We don’t talk, but I just found out she’s got a couple of kids with some geezer. I waited ten years for her to come back but?”
When it comes to damage and doggedness, Randy “The Ram” Robinson is a match for the man portraying him. In a vertical line between his pumped pecs, like a valley railroad, runs the scar of his bypass surgery. The man should be totally retired, but then life without the adrenalin hit of the ring is no life at all for such a danger junkie. In this reading of crazed American heroism, manhood is shown to be, at heart, little more than a lethal extension of adolescence. Self-harm is the order of the day, whether this comes in the form of getting into a ring with a man twice your strength and half your age, or puncturing your flesh with a staple gun to make the blood gush theatrically. The man is a heart attack waiting to happen.
Then there is a storyline that looks like a reworking of Rourke’s own agonies. The Ram has a daughter, whom he has neglected in pursuit of his career. He tries to make amends and establish a relationship with her, but he lets her down again. In the light of what happened between him and Otis, and of what he goes on to say about his abusive family member, this storyline is some conflation of the two. “I don’t know what happened to the guy. I don’t talk about him. I don’t give a f***. I haven’t seen him or talked to him for 20-something years.”
So he doesn’t know if the man is alive or dead? “I don’t know. I don’t ask. I heard he is alive.”
What did happen between them, back when Mickey was a roaring teenager? It seems important to him, as if it explains so much of what went on – the two-fisted rage, the run as a boxer until his late teens, the switch to showbusiness, that other great escape of young Americans from poverty and boredom. He approaches the subject again, this time pausing as if he is going to spill the beans, then pushes it away again like a dish too many.
Rourke is one of those classic hellraisers whose life threatens to upstage the work. Much of that work, for example in Alan Parker’s Angel Heart or Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly, has been justly praised and brought comparisons with Nicholson and De Niro. About other ventures, such as Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, he is even more contemptuous, and less printable, than the critics.
Because he is the star of his own continuous drama, it is impossible to untangle the one from the other. The result of this is that as he speaks, it is hard to know whether he hams it for the sake of effect, or whether he is enacting the feelings which others might merely describe. The second, probably, bearing in mind he trained at the famous Lee Strasberg Institute. When Rourke gets mad, acting or not acting, there is method in it.
The question is, how do you get to save yourself, not to mention the rest of the world, from such madness? His answer is the answer of countless addicts who swear they will give up their toxic whatever in order to reclaim the one they love. “I tried to change so that Carré would come back,” he says. “To begin with I went through the motions of therapy because I didn’t believe in it. I’d have more belief in a priest. I thought therapists were crazy people, and I didn’t realise how crazy I was myself. I thought I could do this change thing in maybe three or four years, and here I am 14 years later. At the beginning I was doing three days a week, and I didn’t have the money to pay the therapist.”
It would be a great gag, but not strictly true, to say it was the rage therapy bills that brought him to bankruptcy. But he did find himself owing the man $60,000. Does he consider himself reformed? “Not reformed, no, but I have come to understand why I self-destructed. It was to do with authority. I wouldn’t let any man look at me and give me the eye. I didn’t care if he was 7ft tall with muscles on top of muscles. It was on. Eye contact with them, on the street, it would be on, right there. Well, I don’t carry myself that way any more, I don’t go looking for that. Any authority figure at all, any producer who told me something, and it was, get the f*** out of the room. I didn’t know that’s what happened to me. Now I’m accountable. I also understand I’m responsible for repercussions.”
As if to test-drive this new reasonableness, a press officer puts her head round the door of the hotel suite where this conversation is taking place. She looks bossy and has a five-more-minutes hand raised. He wants to go on talking, but he couldn’t be milder with her. “Before,” he resumes, “there were no rules, no accountability. It was just f*** you, take me to jail, go ahead.” He is even happy to commit the boxer’s heresy of praising professional wrestlers. “I have a lot of respect for a sport I was ignorant about. I take my hat off to those guys, I really do.”
Before going back for one last look at the source of his rage, he talks of his contact with American legends. When he was learning to box in his teens, he used the same gym as Muhammad Ali. Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, was there, as were the Quarry brothers, great white hopes who died young from Parkinson’s. Twenty years later, towards the end of his own stint as a pro, Rourke got short-term memory loss. “I started getting slugged. For three years I got the living piss knocked out of me. I could remember stuff from ten years ago, but not ten minutes.” He got out just in time and says he’s in better order now.
He now has friends who are cerebral in a less destructive way. One, called Bob, has become important, and Rourke describes him as the most interesting person in the world. “I’ve known him several years and we talk on the phone. Well, he’s not big talking on the phone. Not big talking, period. I had a little part in some arty farty movie we did. He called me in the middle of the night and I’d say, ‘Who’s this?’ And he’d say, ‘Bob.’ And I’d say, ‘Bob who?’ And he said, ‘You know? Bob.’ Oh f***. Bob Dylan. He would ask me what he should be doing in a scene when he had no dialogue, and I would say, ‘Why not do some activity?’ I’d give him some little acting points, and we became friends.”
Another strange and vital companion is right here in the room and has been all along. It is Loki, a tiny chihuahua, scarcely bigger than a rodent, who has been as trouble-free as it is possible for a living thing to be. It’s really very funny, when you think that Rourke might well have been one of those men you see on the pavement pulling back a mighty canine extension of their own menace. But no, Rourke has enough muscles of his own, even if they have become more of a personal comfort zone than a set of battle-ready armour. The little dog seems to say the owner is house-trained and comes in peace.
So. The violent family member; the toxic rage. What was the link? What happened? “Well? one of the tools I had from very young was I had power in both hands. That can’t be taught. You’re born with it. Also, it came from what was inside me. When I was throwing [punches], I was throwing at the man who did what he did, you understand? He was a scary, violent guy.”
And he knocked Mickey about? “Yeah, and my little brother Joe.” And one day Mickey retaliated? There is a pause and he says, “Ah, no. But you see, that’s the issue. My physical strength, the way I carried myself, all that machismo was covering the shame, the abandonment and the fear that I felt. It is easier for a proud man to be angry than to feel a sense of smallness.”
Yet the boy that Mickey was had much to be proud of. “Yes, but at six or seven, when you can’t defend yourself? Even at 16, when I was doing really well as an amateur, and he and I had words and he challenged me to come out the back and fight with him, and we were walking out the door to do it, and I thought, ‘He’s going to kill me,’ he was good with his hands.”
Mickey was already useful himself. “Yes, but I weighed 145lb and he was well over 200, and I’m thinking, if I don’t beat him he will kill me because this is the opportunity he’s always wanted?” So the problem is not that Mickey let him have it, but that he didn’t. Is that it? Rourke clenches his face again into what looks like a “Yes”.
The minder comes in again and calls time, Rourke scoops the dog up in a damaged hand, and out. He says this wrestling film is the best thing he’s done. He probably means it, as even the new improved Mickey Rourke is unlikely to go dutiful for the sake of promotion. This is a Lloyd’s Building of a man, or a Pompidou Centre, with all the usually hidden and internal bits hanging off the side in plain view. He’s down and out then up and back, sorted and therapised, a true American fighter in the modern manner. It may look unreal, but the triumphs were sweet and the tumbles hurt, and if you don’t like it, you know what you can do.
