As The Wrestler approaches its UK release amid a fanfare of critical acclaim, we at Movie Vortex have been privileged enough to catch up with Mickey Rourke to discuss the nuances of this complex character, whose problems in life bear remarkable similarities that of the star himself. How did he cope? Is he really a wrestling fan? Is he back in Hollywood to stay? Well, Mike did find out, but before the interview technically started there was a brief chat about his dog Loki which I hope Mr. Rourke will not mind us including…

[As I walk in, I notice a small Chihuahua sleeping next to Mr Rourke] Oh, is that the dog that got you fired once?

Yeah.

What happened?

I was just saying to this guy, you know, ‘Would you look after my dog?’ And the producer comes over and she goes ‘No, I don’t want the dog in the scene’ and I’m like ‘Whoa whoa whoa, stop right there it’s not fucking taking anyone’s place here!’ I’m flat broke at this point and next thing I know is Dennis Hopper is coming over telling me they’re firing me. But it turned out her [the producer] father was ‘the man’. So that was a choice I never should’ve made. But I wasn’t having anything said about Loki. It was a piece of shit film anyway, but afterwards I couldn’t get no work for like 15 years until Sean Penn called me up to do a day’s work on The Pledge, so as soon as I get there Sean walks over to me and I have Loki with me, he says ‘Is that the dog?’ and I just say ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to use the dog in the scene!’ [After a pause] Shall we start?

Sure. There was a lot of 80s music in the film, are you a fan?

No, not at all. Axel Rose is a friend of mine though, and when I used to box I came out Sweet Child of Mine though so… But in this movie we couldn’t afford that music, he just gave it to us.

That’s not the only musical gift to the movie though is it?

Yeah. When the movie was over I wrote Bruce Springsteen a letter, a very personal letter, about my character and me, and about the things we had in common. I asked if maybe he’d write us a song and he wrote us a very fucking beautiful song that I’m so proud of because he took the time in the middle of a European tour to write a special song.

Did Darren Aronofsky ask you to draw on any of your own fighting experience when you were shooting?

No. But Darren let me rewrite all the scenes with the daughter and the steroids and stuff, and the speech at the end so we could make it personal. And thank God he hired Evan Rachel Wood who’s a tremendous actress, and I guess she had some issues with her father that were kind of similar so some really nice stuff started happening.

You’d been written off for a long time before this movie…

15 years!

So after that gap, what’s your relationship with Hollywood like now?

You know what, it wasn’t really Hollywood [that was the problem], it was my mindset. Coming out of The Actors Studio, I was like one of the last generation left there when Strasberg was alive and I studied very hard, it was difficult to get in – they took like four people out of thousands every year – and you had Elia Kazan and all these names on the board, and you finally get in there and see people like Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel and Christopher Walken and it’s like a big honour to be there. And I studied really hard, then taught there for a year before I was told I shouldn’t hide in a classroom, I should get out there and just do it. So I went to California and what happened slowly when I got into Los Angeles is I saw that it’s not just about the acting, it’s a business, it’s political. And I just had no knowledge of how to do that. Eventually either you look at some other guy who’s making a movie and they’re calling him a movie star or whatever, and thinking ‘that guy can’t even carry a jockstrap!’ It just makes you think, hang on a minute, there’s a lot of grey here. What had happened is, just because of my temperament and my upbringing really, I took it personal and I short-circuited.

So are you ready to play the game now?

Well I’ve been in therapy for 13 years! I had some issues from my childhood that I had to straighten out that I had never dealt with, and so its taken me 13 years to be able to change. Before I’d tell people I was not accountable and there were no rules. Authority was a big problem. And I took everything personal, like an insult. I’m an old school guy and I wasn’t sophisticated or knowledgeable enough to know that there are rules and you have to be accountable no matter how good you are. There’s repercussions and the repercussions are severe. When I look back, I used to say ‘It’s them, they’re the enemy’ and it was me. I was having this war with myself because of issues that I have.

That sounds really hard.

I had to lose everything in order to look in the mirror and say ‘wait a minute’. When you lose your house, your wife, your career, your everything in one time, your friends, your encourage is leaving with everything they can carry and you’re standing there in the dark with your thumb in your ass you have to look in the mirror and say ‘it’s your fault’. I was set in my ways, for me it was a street code and it was all about honour and respect and as soon as I didn’t feel that I… In other words I was hiding behind an armour that I had built up physically and mentally and It became a destructive weakness that it took me 13 years to change. I thought I could change in a year and I couldn’t, even at therapy 3 days a week. I had some heavy-duty issues. I was afraid that if I changed I wouldn’t be a man. It was a macho fear of the change; I was ashamed to admit I was going to therapy. For me it would’ve been easier to go talk to a priest than a therapist.

Do you ever worry that you’ll lose it again?

I'll never lose it again; it's too lonely, too dark. And I'm too old to change. So no, not even a little

Did you have to be convinced by Darren to take this role?

When I met Darren the living in shame aspect of the character, the fact he was a has-been, it hit me in the face really hard. And when you meet Darren Aranofsky, I knew that this guy sitting in front of me would want his pound of flesh.  I knew he’d want me to revisit some very dark, painful places and I also knew that I’d have to go through several months of putting on 30 pounds of muscle and really working hard. But it was the emotional thing that I was…it’s been many many years since I’ve given all of myself to a director, like, all of myself. And I realised that if I had an opportunity to work with him it’d be real special. You know that as soon as you meet him because it’s like I say, Darren Aronofsky, he is smarter than the rest of us and it’s kind of challenging and exciting to meet someone who, if you do your work, he can just say one thing and it’ll take you to another level.

Has a director struck you like that before?

I remember hearing about [Francis Ford] Coppola, and then meeting Francis… Francis used to speak to me when I was doing Rumble Fish and say words I’d have to look up in the dictionary because I didn’t know what the fuck they meant! We were doing what he’d called motorcycle boy and I thought it was meant to be some sort of Hell’s Angel and he goes ‘No he’s more like Camus’ and I go ‘Camus?? Who the fuck is that?’ and he gives me a big fucking book and I wonder what this has to do with motorcycles! But Darren, what he did, more than anything, is challenge me. It was like a trainer or a boxing coach, he relayed it to me that me.

Is that how you coped with the emotional aspect of the role?

No, how I coped with the emotional aspects of the role is I made it all personal. There was a trust thing involved. There was trust and respect, and that grew daily. He earned mine and I earned his. It happened very quickly on the first day. There’s a lot of guys and you can sit and have a chat or a meeting and they’ll go talk about we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do that and they get on the floor and they are a mess. He got on the floor and he was prepared. He did his research, he did his homework, he didn’t let me make crazy choices.

Crazy choices?

I wanted to wear rose coloured sunglasses and he said ‘You wear rose-coloured sunglasses in all your movies’ and then I said OK, I want to wear a hearing aid, and he just said ‘no props’. I had to explain that this wasn’t a prop, I had to fight for the hearing aid. On the day we were shooting he came to me and asked if I really believed in it and I said ‘Yes, trust me. I knew a wrestler that had one. I used to go to the gym he was at and sometimes I’d talk to him and my bro would be like ‘Hey! He hasn’t got his hearing aid in!’’ So the hearing aid is showing part of the physical deterioration. So it wasn’t like I’d have used the rose sunglasses, to hide behind.

Do you see any parallels between the film and your own life?

Yeah, people bring that up. There’s many, I mean as far as the physical thing with the boxing and the wrestling, I’ve always been pretty athletic. I used to say to people though that wrestling and boxing are like ping pong and rugby, so different. I had no idea you had to be so fit to be a wrestler.

You thought it was a gimmick maybe?

I thought it was a gimmick; I had no respect for it. But after four months of having 3 MRIs in the first to months and walking around limping, and I had several months of pumping iron and constantly eating to put on all that weight. I have a three-storey walk to my apartment in New York and my trainer, who’s a cage fighter I hired because he’s real strict and wouldn’t take any shit and he could kick my ass, he’d put his hand on my back and push me up the stairs because my knees were shot, my neck was shot and if I’d want to get up off the couch I’d have to yell for Daniel. The training aspect was that devastating.

[I attempt to interrupt but it fails.]

And these guys they get hurt. The more research we did we saw that these guys can’t even tie their shoes. They feed off the adrenaline of the crowd and if they dive off the top rope, they only land right 40% of the time. And if they land wrong they’re going to break a shoulder or tear a ligament, they’ll break something. These guys came to the premiere and they’re all walking with a limp and what made me happier than anything is these guys, guys like Rick Flair, Brutus Beefcake, they liked the movie. Rowdy Piper was like in tears. I ended up having a respect for a sport that I had no respect for in the beginning.

You’ve been spoken about as an Oscar frontrunner now, how does that feel?

Scary. It makes me want to smoke! I’ve been out of work 15 years, you know, so I’m just really grateful to get an opportunity, a chance to work again. But I have to just admit that this movie in the hands of another director would not have been the movie that it is. It’s the best movie I’ve ever made, and it’s the hardest movie I ever made. He has such a passion and he’s such a perfectionist that he made me break my ass when I didn’t want to. I wanted to go home to Miami and party at Christmas time but he says no, you can’t wrestle for shit. He made me stay and train, and I did that because I respected and trusted him.

If they made a biopic of your life, who could they get to play you?

They’d have to get three people to do it because two of them would die.