Interview

You know what it is? You get desensitized to getting hit. That's where the damage comes in. It's not the fights that fuck you up. It's the decade  or so that you spend sparring.—Mickey Rourke 

MR: It's really based on all of the wrestlers from the '80s, who pretty much went through that whole catharsis of transformation with moving from time to time and getting older and having to take performance-enhancing drugs to get bigger. And, at the end of the day, a lot of them walked away with no health care, no compensation for anything. They're kind of like old shipwrecks by the end of their careers, in their early 40s, or late 30s even.

CW: I did a play once in Calgary, which is a wrestling capital, you know.

MR: Oh, I didn't know that.

CW: And I stayed in this funky hotel where the bar was a wrestlers' hangout. There were these huge guys-they were very nice. They were, you know, wearing jackets with fringe on them.

MR: Yeah, yeah. They're a wild bunch. I didn't realize the camaraderie that they have among them. It's so unlike boxers, who are very isolated-or isolated within their own camps.

CW: You have a lot of experience with boxers behind the scenes. Is there a comparative thing between boxing and wrestling?

MR: You know, the two sports are as different as Ping-Pong and rugby. In boxing, you don't know what's going to happen. In wrestling, it's already prearranged. But the thing I didn't know about wrestling is that you really get hurt. Because, you know, you're wrestling in front of a live audience, and you end up doing things like jumps or slams, and 40 percent of the time you don't land right.

CW: And there's an accidental elbow in the face or something like that.

MR: Exactly. So these guys are all pretty busted-up by the ends of their careers. Since I knew it was all choreographed, I thought, Oh, they don't get hurt at all. But I walked away with a renewed respect for the sport. Because I was very ignorant before-I knew nothing about it.

CW: You know, there are maybe a couple of people in my life who I wouldn't mind hitting with a folding chair.

MR: Exactly.

CW: Is that fun?

MR: Well, yeah, but sometimes you don't get hit with the flat part of the chair. You get hit with the blunt part. And you get hurt.

CW: People make mistakes.

MR: Yeah. I mean, by the end of the shoot, my trainer was pushing me up three flights of stairs to my house and holding my arm like I was an old cripple. I had three MRIs in the first two months of working on the film. I felt like it really was over by the time we started shooting the movie.

CW: The actors love you. You know that. And you must be feeling that right now.

MR: Well, you know, look at it this way: I was pretty much out of work for 13 or 14 years, and toward the tail end of my sort of exile . . . I mean, I took the five and a half years off to go back and do the boxing, and then it was still seven or eight years before I started to work a little bit. [Steve] Buscemi gave me something to do in Animal Factory [2000] and then [Sylvester] Stallone gave me something in Get Carter [2000] . . .

CW: You were amazing in Sean Penn's film The Pledge [2001].

MR: When I did Sean Penn's movie, I think I was living in, like, a $500-a-month room, and someone called me up or bumped into me and asked me if I'd come up to work for a day. That sort of got me going a little bit. But it wasn't until Sin City [2005] that I kind of got back into the game.

CW: When you were boxing, did you have real bouts with pros?

MR: Yeah. I had 12 fights-10 wins, two draws.

CW: Where?

MR: In Germany, Japan, Argentina, Oklahoma, St. Louis, Miami . . .

CW: The people who were watching you must have known you were an actor.

MR: Exactly. I tried to change my name for the fights, but the only way they could pay me money was if I used my own name. I wanted to change my name to, like, Romeo something-or-other, and they said, "No, we can't do that. We've got to use Mickey Rourke." Because they paid me a lot of money to go over to Europe and Asia to fight. I wanted to change my name to Romeo Florentino. But they didn't go for that. Romeo Florentino-that's a good fighter's name.

CW: But they're paying for Mickey Rourke-they want Mickey Rourke.

MR: Exactly. Not Romeo Florentino.

CW: So what was that like? The thing is that if somebody hit me-even lightly-I'd fall on the floor. That would be it.

MR: Well, you know what it is? You get desensitized to getting hit. That's where the damage comes in. It's not the fights that fuck you up. It's the decade or so that you spend sparring.

CW: That's how they say Ali got hurt.

MR: Yeah, it's all that. Because I would spar an average of probably close to 30 rounds a week.

CW: You wore headgear, right?

MR: I wore it most of the time, but lots of times I didn't. Then, I think it was around my 11th fight, I started having some memory-loss issues. I took a neurological exam, and they said, "Well, you should stop fighting now." And I kept begging them for one more fight, one more fight, and the doctor said to me, "How much are they going to pay you?" I was supposed to fight three more times, and one would have been for a cruiser belt. So I said, "I just need to fight three more times." He said, "Listen, you can't even get hit in the head one more time, your neuro is so bad."

CW: Well, I hope that's over with.

MR: It's been over with for 10 years now. I took a picture in Freddie Roach's gym of me sitting in a rocking chair.

CW: There's this story that Julian Schnabel painted a picture of you.

MR: Yeah. He painted a picture that he dedicated to my character in Rumble Fish. It was called The Motorcycle Boy. I remember when he brought it over to me at the Mayflower Hotel [in New York] years ago. This is when you and I knew each other.

CW: The Mayflower Hotel was the actors' haven.

MR: It was the actors' hangout. And I remember that he brought it over there one day, and I looked at it, and I couldn't . . . I looked at it sideways, I looked at it upside-down, I kept looking for the motorcycle, and I couldn't find one. It was some sort of abstract painting. But Julian and I have been friends for 20-some years now.

CW: Julian says that he has Marlon Brando's -boxing gloves.

MR: That's right.

CW: But nobody's ever seen them.

MR: He keeps wanting to give them to me, and I keep telling him to keep them.

CW: Well, you should take them.

MR: Yeah, but I have so many boxing gloves around my house that I would get them confused with other gloves.

CW: I was someplace doing a play, and I went to this auction where Muhammad Ali's boxing trunks were up for bid. They were signed and everything. It was 1972, after the Vietnam thing had put him out of the business-you know, him not going into the Army. Nobody wanted these trunks. I got them for $40. Did I ever show them to you?

MR: No, I don't think so. But I think we had a conversation about this once, because when I was like 12 or 13, Ali gave me a pair of his trunks that were white satin with gold stripes. They were full of blood, and my mother threw them away. I think it's the first time I ever cursed at my mother.

CW: These ones I bought are Everlast. They're black and white, and it says "The Real Champ: 1972" on them. And nobody wanted them because Ali was sort of off the radar. But come over to my house. I want to show them to you.

MR: I've got to tell you a funny story about Ali. I think it was around my seventh or eighth fight, and I got really nervous because I was fighting a pretty tough cookie from the Bahamas with a really good record. I couldn't sleep at night-my hands were sweating, my feet were sweating-and I'd get up, and I'd start shadowboxing. I was a nervous, shaking wreck. So I called up this photographer I knew named Howard Bingham, who'd done books on Ali. I said, "Howard, can you do me a favor? Man, I've got this fight, and I'm a nervous fuckin' wreck. Do you think I can talk to Muhammad Ali? I think he could calm  me down a little." This is, like, 10 or 12 years ago.

CW: Where were you?