A few years ago, the great Mickey Rourke, whose various, uh, issues have overshadowed his brilliant acting career, appeared on “The Masked Singer.” He wore a purple Gremlin costume and sang “Stand By Me” in a way that made Tom Waits sound like Maria Callas.
But that puffy Gremlin get-up was hot and Rourke, unable to wait for anyone to guess who was under the costume — basically, the entire point of the show — started to disrobe.
“I want to take this off, right now,” he said in that chipmunky disguised voice as he tugged at the costume.
“No, you can’t do that,” judge Jenny McCarthy pleaded.
Host Nick Cannon tried to hold the furry Gremlin head down and put his hand over the Gremlin head, but Rourke prevailed and tossed it to the side as the audience cheered.
So was it any wonder this week when Rourke, 73 and more than a decade past his last significant movie role (“Sin City: A Dame to Kill For,” 2014), resurfaced as the beneficiary of a touching, oh-so-21st century charity drive that he somehow refused to acknowledge?
There he was, plastered across a sequence of TMZ photos with his jeans falling down as he carried his dog to a hotel after being evicted from his home, which he was reportedly renting for $7,000-a-month. His troubles sparked a GoFundMe campaign that, in just over a day, topped out at more than $100,000 with donors including director Brett Ratner and wrestler Chris Jericho.
This fundraiser, started by his manager, appeared to have helped Rourke get through this housing crisis. Everybody loves a happy ending and so do I, which is why I texted Rourke Monday night.
He responded immediately, with a not-small wrinkle to the story.
“I swear on my brother I got nuthing to do with it,” Rourke wrote back. “It’s embarrassing.”
We texted a little more about how he had no idea what GoFundMe even was, and then he had to go to the gym. But before he signed off, Rourke urged me to listen to “Just the Other Side of Summer,” a Kris Kristofferson song. The singer died in 2024 but Rourke still talks to him.
“Kris sits on end of couch and says to me, ‘its all gonna b ok,” Rourke texted. “ ‘I am right here with you.’ ”
Hours later, he popped up in a Tuesday morning Instagram post, in a pink T-shirt and cowboy hat, cradling one of his many small dogs, Lucky, in his ripped, tattooed arms, to reiterate how offended he was by this GoFundMe. He acknowledged it had raised a lot of money. But Rourke maintained he didn’t want a cent.
“If I needed money, I wouldn’t ask for no f—ing charity,” he said calmly.
Mickey Rourke’s story can’t be told without a spin through his filmography. There, we find a special actor with a gift for heart-touching, untidy performances that balance ruthlessness and vulnerability.
Janet Maslin described his “Boogie,” the feckless ladies’ man of “Diner,” as the sweetest character in the 1982 ensemble. Roger Ebert called him “a violent unmade bed” in 1987’s “Angel Heart.” (That was a compliment.) That the former boxer had leading-man looks didn’t hurt. Even from the time of his early scene-stealing supporting roles in “Body Heat” and “Rumble Fish,” most assumed he could be the next Al Pacino.
If you haven’t seen any of his work from his prime (“9 ½ Weeks” and “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” among his top-lining roles of the mid-80s) or his late-career resurgence with his Oscar-nominated 2008 performance in “The Wrestler,” then I would suggest you start with 1987’s “Barfly.” It’s a wild, rambling master class in how to slip into the skin of a character, in this case the troubled writer and poet Charles Bukowski (once dubbed the “laureate of the low life,” by Time magazine). Just watch the short sequence in which Rourke, after getting whacked in a fight by his equally soused girlfriend Wanda (Faye Dunaway), lumbers around the apartment with a liquor bottle in his hand and classical music on blast. Rourke was at peak handsome, and yet for this role, he’s wearing boxers and a bloodied T-shirt that doesn’t quite cover his belly. He talks to himself in the mirror, cleans the head wound by pouring liquor over his stringy hair and greets a guy at the door by telling him, with a menacing half-dance, that his real name is Leon Spinks. This is the same year Tom Cruise was doing his own liquor-soaked movie, spinning bottles in the Benetton-cheese of “Cocktail.”
For reasons that are still unclear, Rourke left Hollywood in the late ‘80s and went back to boxing. By the time he made that comeback — in “Sin City” and “Iron Man II,” in addition to “The Wrestler” — he had transformed into a different physical being, as bruised on the outside as within.
Personally, I had sort of lost track. Until the tabloid excitement over his eviction.
On Tuesday, Kimberly Hines, his manager, called to explain her side of what happened.
She said that Rourke has been fighting with his landlord and stopped paying rent. The house had no water, proliferating mold and a nonfunctioning refrigerator. The owner filed court papers to evict Rourke. Hines, who was out of the country, called a Rourke pal to help him move to a hotel. (The landlord did not return a call.)
“This was to get him out of this horrific house of horrors,” Hines told me. “And then I said to my assistant, who is a really sweet girl, ‘What can we do?’ And she said, ‘let’s do a little GoFundMe for Mickey because he’s not working,’ and we had no idea it would raise like $100,000 in 24 hours. And you know, the money is for Mickey. And by the way, if Mickey does not want it, nobody’s touching the money. It will go back to his fans.”
So why did so many people respond so quickly for an actor who hasn’t been very visible lately?
Chris Jericho, the wrestler and actor who contributed $1,000, said you can’t underestimate how many people remember his best work, and the fact that he did thrive in Hollywood for more than a decade. Jericho’s motivation was simple. He saw that Rourke needed help. He hopes that if he were in the same position, others would respond.
Did he have second thoughts after watching Rourke’s Instagram video?
“I’ll tell you what I make of it,” said Jericho. “And this is why I like Mickey. He’s a true artist. A little off his rocker but in the best possible way. Hopefully the money goes to him and hopefully he can use it.”
Rourke, reached Wednesday night, still didn’t sound like he was budging.
“Tell him to get his money back,” he texted. “Tell him I said thanks for the love.”
Hines said that if Rourke ultimately doesn’t want to take the money, it can be returned. But she was pleased with one good thing that came out of the publicity. She started fielding offers for him again. Rourke, she says, is physically strong and still capable of another comeback.
Rourke also he is eager to get back to work.
“I’m very grateful for what I have,” he said on his Instagram. “I got a roof over my head. I’ve got food … look, I’ve got some bananas, and everything’s okay … I wouldn’t do it this way. I got too much pride, man.”
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