Ah, Rourke’s buttons. Who hasn’t heard about them? His problems with, but yearning for, discipline. His temper (famously, he once beat up his ex-wife’s drug dealer). His inability to deal with authority. “I’ve got to watch my ass every second of the day,” he tells me. “I mean, I’m not as out of control and unpredictable as I was. I’m accountable now. I really am. But still there’s always going to be that little man with the hatchet inside of me.”
In almost every interview over the past year, Rourke has laid the blame for this psychic torment on the abuse he suffered at the hands of a brutal stepfather. And he has thanked God and his therapist, a guy he simply calls Steve, for helping him to keep his rage in check.
How well Rourke has heeded God and Steve is put to the test when I mention a recent profile in the New York Times Magazine in which Rourke’s stepfather denied any abuse and painted the actor as a poser who has faked his own suffering to justify his tough-guy persona and get attention. Rourke bristles, but doesn’t blow.
“Let me just say one thing to you: I studied — and struggled and persevered and concentrated and focused like a fucking monk — to be the actor that I am, and then I threw it all away,” he says. “You don’t do that unless you got issues, and those issues are fucking real. And there’s no gray there. They’re all fucking black and white.”
Rourke’s sister and stepsister issued a statement denouncing the Times piece. They noted that had the writer contacted them, they would’ve backed their brother up.
You can almost see Rourke catching himself again as he changes the subject and begins to talk of being grateful. There were the friends who gave him work when he could barely afford to eat: Francis Ford Coppola, who featured him in the 1997 courtroom drama The Rainmaker; Sean Penn, who put him opposite Nicholson in his ’01 movie The Pledge; even Sylvester Stallone.
In 1999, Stallone came over to Rourke in a restaurant. “He said, ‘Listen, I’m doing this movie, and I need somebody in it who looks like they can kick my ass. You look like you can kick my ass,’ ” Rourke recalls. “I’m sitting there going, ‘I can barely pay for this bowl of spaghetti. Goddamn do I need a movie.’ ” But when his agent got the call about the job, a remake of Get Carter, the money was so low it was “disrespectful,” Rourke says. He turned it down but thanked Stallone for the gesture. Suddenly, the money doubled. Rourke took the job. When he arrived on set, an assistant filled him in. “Sly really wanted you to be in the movie, and that asshole producer wouldn’t pay for it,” so Stallone kicked in the rest of the money.
Wouldn’t it be sweet, I ask, if it turns out that his fall from grace and long fight back up gave him the strength to finally redeem himself? Wouldn’t it be fucking Shakespearean if the Ram ends up giving Rourke what the wrestler couldn’t find a way to give himself: a future?
Rourke strokes his mustache with his right thumb. Then he speaks. “I know what I can do. And very few people can do what I can do,” he says firmly. “I ain’t got no problem with not getting an Oscar this year. Sure, I’d be disappointed. But you know what, then I’ll say, ‘Fuck you, I’m coming back next year.’ And I’ll goddamn mean it. I ain’t going away this time.”
