Alan Franks
Writer and musician
Writer and musician
Exclusive: On Meeting Mickey Rourke
It was right there in his face, all mashed and half-mended, with bits of ear taken off (echoes of Mike Tyson here) to help remake his nose. Seeing him now, in the gong-gathering season, with his hair straggling down his face, I can’t work out whether he’s hiding behind it or just lending his personal appearance the stamp of his current role.
I say there were just two of us, but this would be to ignore the dog. Not a mighty Rottweiler of the sort behind which powerful men lean back and go sidewalk-surfing, but a tiny chihuahua called Loki, no bigger than a rodent. He was plainly devoted to the creature – who has since died – and was perhaps even dependent. I wondered whether Loki was a badge of peace or whether Rourke feared that something from a higher weight division would upstage him. I would have asked him, but I only noticed the dog right at the end, when we were out of time.
He said some shocking things about people and events in his past, and much of it we couldn’t publish. The libel lawyer ran his eyes over it and blenched. The print version of beeping-out occurred. Rourke left me in no doubt that in an earlier period of his life he would have had no scruples about punching certain women whom he believed had wronged someone close to him. Nasty stuff. He also recounted how he had smashed a drug dealer so hard in the face that the blood went twenty feet in the air and the man was out cold before he hit the ground. All delivered in the middle mode beween shocking and sharing; the authentic voice of the unbroken American male finally reined in by pain, time, divorce and remorse. Oh and therapy; years and years of one-to-one so extensive and expensive that it threatened to bankrupt him.
So that’s the creature whom we applaud as he ducks between the ropes once more and prepares to show the world he’s back; a classic prodigal, slugged but sorted, worked out, worked on and finally looking like a winner. All the publicity says Mickey Rourke is playing the wrestler, but it could just be the other way round. Like the Big Fights, it isn’t a pretty sight and some of us might feel we make ourselves a little grubby by watching. The trouble is we can’t take our eyes off it.
See also Alan's interview with Mickey Rourke
Alan Franks recalls on his own website his recent encounter with Mickey Rourke.
When you go up to collect your award, you can either winslett or your can rourke. Winsletting is when the emotion of the moment leaves you so distraught that you start panting and can’t remember the names of the jealous rivals looking up at you. Rourking is when you swig champagne by the neck, make chauvinist jokes and pepper the audience with profanities. Either way, it is a means of putting speechlessness in place of a speech; freaking out or beeping out.
Considering how often actors are accused of being hollow and insincere, there is something reassuring about both these performances since they are not performances at all. They are a glimpse of the real people, whether you like them or not, slipping out of those other lives which they inhabit for a living.
Now, in the case of Rourke, who won the Golden Globe Award for best actor, there may not be a world of difference between his own embattled, once-violent self, and the character of Randy “The Ram” Robinson, hero of The Wrestler. Both are veterans of the ring – boxing in Rourke’s case – and both are trying to redeem a career which they have all but wrecked by their own unruliness. Rourke himself said - I paraphrase – that he had effed his up for fourteen years.
Show business and sport are the two classic escape routes for young Americans with a poor start, and Rourke has used them both. From his account of it, his young life was pretty dire – violence in his Miami neighbourhood, violence in his family, violence in his head and his fists. As a teenager he trained in the gym where Muhammad Ali had started his career; he sparred with a fearsome welterweight ex-champ, Luis Rodriguez. As Brando’s Terry Molloy says of himself in On The Waterfront , he couda been a contenda. He went into the movies with great success (Year of the Dragon, 9 ½ Weeks, Angel Heart), and only became a professional boxer at 34, the age when most fighters with any brains left are quitting.
Five and half years later he was diagnosed with short-term memory loss and went back into films. The Wrestler is his equivalent of an old fighter’s last shot to regain the title; the friends look on in bemusement, a hard but trusting trainer –in this case the producer Darren Aronofsky – takes him on, the bout is a triumph and Rourke is back at the top of the pile. That’s the way it’s going; victorious at the Golden Globes, victorious at the Baftas, KO'd by Sean Penn at the Oscars.
When I met him late last year, just before the release of the film, he talked in pugilistic terms; how his fists and his terrible rage had got him into trouble; how everything was riding on this film; how he had punished his 52-year-old body into the muscular form of a 230-pound wrestler. As transformations go, it is as striking as Robert de Niro’s in Raging Bull, to which The Wrestler is being compared.
Being in the same room as him, just the two of us, was unnerving. It wasn’t that I thought he’d punch me in the face if I asked a question he didn’t like, just that there was an eerie calm about him. That, and a sense of some old, burnt-out violence somehow clinging to his person.
When you go up to collect your award, you can either winslett or your can rourke. Winsletting is when the emotion of the moment leaves you so distraught that you start panting and can’t remember the names of the jealous rivals looking up at you. Rourking is when you swig champagne by the neck, make chauvinist jokes and pepper the audience with profanities. Either way, it is a means of putting speechlessness in place of a speech; freaking out or beeping out.
Considering how often actors are accused of being hollow and insincere, there is something reassuring about both these performances since they are not performances at all. They are a glimpse of the real people, whether you like them or not, slipping out of those other lives which they inhabit for a living.
Now, in the case of Rourke, who won the Golden Globe Award for best actor, there may not be a world of difference between his own embattled, once-violent self, and the character of Randy “The Ram” Robinson, hero of The Wrestler. Both are veterans of the ring – boxing in Rourke’s case – and both are trying to redeem a career which they have all but wrecked by their own unruliness. Rourke himself said - I paraphrase – that he had effed his up for fourteen years.
Show business and sport are the two classic escape routes for young Americans with a poor start, and Rourke has used them both. From his account of it, his young life was pretty dire – violence in his Miami neighbourhood, violence in his family, violence in his head and his fists. As a teenager he trained in the gym where Muhammad Ali had started his career; he sparred with a fearsome welterweight ex-champ, Luis Rodriguez. As Brando’s Terry Molloy says of himself in On The Waterfront , he couda been a contenda. He went into the movies with great success (Year of the Dragon, 9 ½ Weeks, Angel Heart), and only became a professional boxer at 34, the age when most fighters with any brains left are quitting.
Five and half years later he was diagnosed with short-term memory loss and went back into films. The Wrestler is his equivalent of an old fighter’s last shot to regain the title; the friends look on in bemusement, a hard but trusting trainer –in this case the producer Darren Aronofsky – takes him on, the bout is a triumph and Rourke is back at the top of the pile. That’s the way it’s going; victorious at the Golden Globes, victorious at the Baftas, KO'd by Sean Penn at the Oscars.
When I met him late last year, just before the release of the film, he talked in pugilistic terms; how his fists and his terrible rage had got him into trouble; how everything was riding on this film; how he had punished his 52-year-old body into the muscular form of a 230-pound wrestler. As transformations go, it is as striking as Robert de Niro’s in Raging Bull, to which The Wrestler is being compared.
Being in the same room as him, just the two of us, was unnerving. It wasn’t that I thought he’d punch me in the face if I asked a question he didn’t like, just that there was an eerie calm about him. That, and a sense of some old, burnt-out violence somehow clinging to his person.