You step gingerly into a dim, winter-dusk hotel room to speak with the actor who plays the 230-pound beast Randy "The Ram" Robinson in "The Wrestler." First you see the tiny, old dog with "Loki" on its collar. Then there's the big man getting himself a drink - water, it turns out - with his back to you. You recall the scraggly hair, the hammered face, the steroid-swollen, battle-battered physique of the Ram. And then Mickey Rourke, "walking around at 192," turns to shake your hand: brown, highlighted and teased hair; eyes all but hidden behind designer shades; carefully groomed goatee; a dandy's ensemble with broad, open collar and bon vivant stripes.
"Nice to meetcha," he says, but without a smile.
He doesn't smile much.
"You know, the 13 years I was out of work was not a picnic. It's sort of a lot of the character, Randy, living in a state of disgrace. You're not what you used to be anymore. That was hell. It's a very lonely, isolated, dark place," he says in the soft, low tone he rarely rises above during the entire conversation, even when describing personal violent events. "Sometimes it gets so dark, you just want a little bit of daylight. It's taken me 10 years to climb out of the window."
This visit to the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills is the latest station on the whistle-stop tour of the Little Train Wreck That Could, the promotional (perhaps confessional) trek for "The Wrestler," a comeback story about an aging, worn-out ring rampager. It's also a no-frills comeback of sorts for director Darren Aronofsky after the gilded excess of "The Fountain." But without contest, the big comeback story is Rourke's.
He was never really "out of work," but went from a greasy-haired golden boy to an industry liability, then to a boxer and, since his return to prominence in "Sin City" (2005), to a high-risk, high-reward gamble. Rourke's gutsy performance in the new film is racking up honors, so far including Golden Globe and Independent Spirit nominations. The question remains whether the bridges the actor napalmed during his years of unchecked rage cut off his path to an Oscar nomination.
"If someone looked at me sideways, that was enough for me to go haywire," Rourke says. "If someone touched me or said something, even if they were in a police uniform, it was on. If I was supposed to be at work at 9, that was challenging me. There was nowhere to go but down with that kind of behavior. I worked very hard to be the actor that I am, and I thought that would carry me, and I was really misinformed.
"I've got to work on myself every day not to slip. You know, I've got this little man with the hatchets like this," he brandishes the imaginary weapons like a cross between Jason Voorhees and Yosemite Sam, "and he's always going to be inside me. I just can't let him out. It's never been about my acting; it's always been about me."
Rourke is beating himself up in interviews published around the country, including a prominent New York Times piece that fact-checked several of the actor's more colorful claims and found them to be false. It's as tough as steering a train to get him to stay on the topic of the film, and one must take his remarks with a grain of salt. But it's hard to question his sincerity about his personal transformation - and the quality of his work in "Sin City" and "The Wrestler" would be enviable for any actor.
"Somebody said to me the other day, 'Do you think you could have given the same performance 15 years ago?' And I said, 'F- yeah,' " he says in a ghostly echo of bravado. "And then I thought about it for a few minutes, and I went, 'No, no. Because Darren would have said something that offended me, and it would have been on.' "
His lips curl into a hint of an ironic smile.
"I'm only going to get a second chance once. I can't make any more mistakes. I'm a nervous wreck if I'm five minutes late for work. I don't care how many zeroes are at the end of the paycheck, I'm going to misbehave if I go to work with someone I don't have respect for or material that doesn't have, I think, integrity to it," Rourke says. "I know I'm not going to be able to work with Darren Aronofsky on every movie, but I'm going to have to find other directors that I can respect."
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