Mickey Rourke barely survived in the 1980s, jacking his acting career, and his face (money maker) broke when he began boxing professionally. Self-anxiety has always been his way of life. The 72-year-old apparently is about to check out the Has-Been hotel, known as the celebrity Big Brother House.
Over the years, thick-skinned British guests have shown that even with stuffing in their careers, this TV circus can be brave unharmed. But the American “Gets” of the show occupies a contemporary equivalent to the freak short tent. They are places of calamity and collapsed fame, and their faces are not entirely their own. They are paraded as relics and horror attractions. About how the feed and GAWP for tabloids to point to, the powerful (well, the powerful and Tara Reed) fell.
Older viewers of the show may no longer recognize Rourke from his time 40 years ago, from his time, and as a oddly cherubic first class man. Young people may not even have heard of him. Who is this Lumpen Pariah?
Despite being an Oscar-nominated, Oscar-nominated and brilliantly vulnerable comeback, despite Darren Aronofsky’s brilliantly vulnerable comeback in The Wrestler (2008), if Sean Penn hadn’t been so troublesome with Milk, he would have won the best actor – Rourke blew an interesting third law chance. Instead, he quickly cashed out his tips for payday roles in disposable films (Iron Man 2, consumables), and now he gets a ton of Instagram of cuffs, preferring his dog (someone who is a child to him), bodybuilding legends, and dead celebrities.
That should have been very different. Rourke began with a turn that he couldn’t take his eyes off of Lawrence Kasdun’s Body Heat (1981), Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982), and Coppola’s Rumble Fish (1983), and had the promise of wild acting for exactly ten years. He became despicable, but subtle. All the ways he tweeted – the tone of a truly chilled conversation – there was no pushy resolve to become the next James Dean or De Niro. (In fact, he makes De Niro a lightly spi – more on this later.) He quickly became the most rauch main man of the day, with a musk that can be caught from the other end of Bourbon Street.
This was a time when actors took risks as sex symbols. This was a risk, such as Adrian Lyne’s intense erotic drama (1986), and MGM decided it was too steamy to be uncut in the US. Critics panned it and the box office struggled, but Rourke and Kim Basinger became even bigger stars.
9 1/2 Weeks Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke – Rex
The Neonor-esque crime thriller has become Rourke’s metier, which includes a pair directed by Michael Simino (The Year of the Dragon and Desperate Time) and what fan favorite angel heart Alan Parker must confess. Still, Rourke was the best thing about it, fully cast as a lonely private investigator in New Orleans, wearing a tattered suit hanging around him like a spider web.
If he had been famous a little earlier, there is a parallel universe where Rourke would have made one Rick Deckard on the blade runner with his shambolic magnetism. In fact, his own praise was reserved for his friend Rutger Hauer, who claimed he had “disappeared Harrison Ford.” (Mickey and Rutger, who co-starred in Nicholas Log’s fascinating failure, Eureka (1983), converge decades later due to a brief lethal interaction in Sin City (2005).
Rourke’s attitude towards acting then set him up for a Hauer-esque career. This was increasingly defined in films that no one saw as cruising around Hollywood in a White Rolls-Royce, then cruising in Cuban Entrege, wearing gold chains. He is probably the silence of the platoon and the lamb, and the lead of the unruly thing. It spurred Travolta’s role in pulp fiction. And when Dustin Hoffman offered him the role of Rain Mann in Tom Cruise, he had forgotten to call Hoffman. Instead, his little-known 1980s star turn is a strange example of foreshadowing, as if his career was always destined to slide down the ditch, and he was destined to look up at the former star (and back).
Angel Heart’s Lisa Bonet and Mickey Rourke – Rex
In Barbet Schroeder’s critically acclaimed Barfly (1987), he played another alcoholic, another survivor, Charles Bukowski. In The Littleseen Homeboy (1989), he played Down and Out Boxer with Brain Damage. And in Walter Hill’s Johnny Handsome (1989), he played a disabled criminal called “Handsome” laughing at his accomplice undergoing experimental cosmetic surgery to avoid being noticed when he left prison.
He already had his distracted and swollen cheeks, appearing to have passed by Softcore Romance Wild Orchid (1989). His acting career had collapsed spectacularly by 1991. “I was slowly self-destructing at a fairly fast speed. I felt like I wasn’t meant to be doing what I was doing, or acting.
And he went under the knife. “I chose the wrong surgeon and put my face back on,” Rourke was once again helpful to his dramatically varied look during the wrestler’s promotional tour. Most of it was “to correct the damage caused by boxing,” he explained, but the film transformed his once-hand handsome face into a pale white of pain, panmarling, poor choices. The story of Mickey Rourke, and all the stories he has done to himself, are written above it.
Mickey Rourke, 62, after knocking out a professional Elliott Seymour boxer (29) in Moscow in 2014 – AFP
“I lost everything,” he told the Guardian on the same tour. “My wife, my house, my friends, my name in my business. I was paying $500 a month for the apartment with my dog. No one really knew I had broken. My friends were giving me hundreds of dollars to eat something.
Rourke frequently talks about the horrific upbringing in the rough parts of Miami. His father, Philip, left at age 7, leaving him to endure allegations of physical abuse from his stepfather. (They reconcile partially only when she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.) His younger brother Joey was beaten by everyone in the neighborhood and had cancer at the age of 17 (later, he died of this in 2004). Rourke’s lifelong sense of shame, and the accompanying self-fatigue, clearly has a lot to do with the arrival of this intense age.
His marriage to American model Carre Otis (his wild orchid co-star) somehow lasted longer than his spouse abuse arrest in 1994 (accusations were later removed). However, since their divorce in 1998, Rourke’s family has been primarily dogs. He adopts a Chihuahuas, primarily lost or rescued from the pound. He never puts them, always lets them get older and die of natural causes. In his darkest times he admitted that his work in care for animals was sometimes the only thing that protected him from suicide. (One of them, an old man’s best friend called Loki, was his constant companion in those wrestler press junkets, but passed away the following year.)
Rourke’s feud with a major Hollywood figure – primarily fellow actors – is very infamous. On the set of Angel Hearts, his hotshot attitude and Calou’s work ethic went under Robert De Niro’s skin, and the pair scratched tightly from each other’s Christmas card list. On social media, Rourke accused De Niro in 2019 of banning him from his favourable role in Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman.” He later unleashes Tyrades, who calls De Niro a “liar,” “crying,” and “punk ass.”
Mickey Rourke of Venice in 2008 and his dog Loki – Getty
Rourke was mostly cast in Jane Campion’s Cut in Cut (2003). There, he would have been perfect for dirty furniture. According to Rourke, Nicole Kidman (“Ice Cube”) refused to work with him, but that was it. Tony Scott’s small role in Man on Fire (2004) had a strangely cut big scene with Denzel Washington. (“I didn’t cut the scene. Tony Scott didn’t cut the scene,” Rourke told The New York Times.
Even after the wrestler, when the Hollywood door quickly returned for him and turned around, Rourke went on the path of most resistance rather than humble his magic. He didn’t know what Iron Man 2 was when it was offered, but no one in the John Favreau movie could not play MCU villain Whiplash along with Rider. He insisted on keeping his hair in samurai bread. He speaks with a Russian accent. And always has a white okakotoo called Sonny on his shoulder. (He naturally adopts birds.)
Mickey Rourke and Al Pacino in 2018 – Getty
His salary requirements were not met. That means Robert Downey Jr. had to reach into his own pocket to make up for the $250,000 Marvel is willing to offer Rourke. Anyway, most of his performances ended up on the floor of the final room, and within a few years he opposed Marvel as the maker of “mineddress comic films,” with Favreau saying “there was no ball.” It was little surprising that Act 3 died with a comeback splattered.
Will celebrity Big Brother introduce some sort of act 4? Perhaps Rourke will be open to his housemates and will give us new and moving insight into his current state of mind. His idea of him oversharing with Patsy Palmer, Daily Thompson licking his shoulder, and asking for guitar lessons from the Chesney Hawks could be tempted to see.
On the other hand, there is no shadow of doubt that Rourke is doing it strictly for his six-figure salary. Why does he care? He can easily flip through the minimal stint and Sukedad dollars, which is a desirable outcome, as it infuriates the producers. If he catches him looking at woebegone while he waits for the clock, he can fall into serious existential pain.
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