FEW ACTORS HAVE BEEN KNOCKED OFF THEIR FEET MORE TIMES THAN HE HAS -- BY HOLLYWOOD, BY HIS OPPONENTS IN THE BOXING RING, AND BY HIS OWN STUBBORN PRIDE.  BUT AFTER WALKING THROUGH HELL -- AND WITH THE SCARS TO PROVE IT -- HE'S A MAN WHO'S LEARNED SOMETHING.  NOW WITH A PUNCH OF NEW MOVIES, MICKEY ROURKE IS BACK.

My interest in Mickey Rourke started with I first saw him in Body Heat, before he had any lines, and he was mouthing the words to Bob Seger's song "I Feel Like A Number."  Just seeing that moment you knew you were witnessing an actor you were never going to forget.  There is a brooding and tormented quality about him, a particularly American quality that has been well described by Tennessee Williams.

Mickey wasn't always humble.  In fact, he could be a real jerk.  People who grew up in private can skate over their adolescence and car crashes.  But when you grow up in the public, in the world of Hollywood, where people become a product, there's very little latitude for conflagration.  All of the violence and battles that have surrounded Mickey's private and public life have humbled him.  Now he can show his gentle and sweet side, and his eyes are wide open; he doesn't miss a thing.

In the beginning he wasn't ready for the fame.  I think that at first, he felt like he didn't deserve the recognition or admiration he was getting.  He didn't feel like he'd accomplished anything; he just knew he was better at his work than most people.  But that wasn't good enough for him.

Sadly, when Marlon Brando died his things were auctioned off at Christie's.  I bought his boxing gloves and offered them to Mickey Rourke for his comeback.  I thought that was apt, but he told me I should hold on to them.

[Karen Wilson, an editorial assistant at Interview, dials Mickey Rourke's number:  phone rings Mickey Rourke picks up.]

Mickey Rourke:  Hello?
Karen Wilson:  Hi, may I speak to Mr. Rourke, please?
MR:  Hello.  What's your name?
KW:  Karen, I'm the editorial assistant at Interview.  I'm calling to connect you with Julian Schnabel.
MR:  Oh, okay.
KW:  I have Julian on the other line.  Do you have any other questions to ask before I connect you?
MR:  Nope, none. Just make sure he's wearing clothes when he's talking to me.
KW:  I didn't ask him if he was.
MR:  Well, we'll find that out in a second, won't we? [Wilson laughs]
KW:  Hey, Julian?  I have Mickey on the line.
MR:  Yeah.  I told her I would do the interview with you as long as you were wearing clothes.
JULIAN SCHNABEL:  I'm not wearing clothes.
MR:  Well, you better have some underpants on.
JS:  I don't have any.
MR:  Then I'll take mine off while we talk.
JS:  All right. As long as you don't touch yourself. [laughs]
MR:  I won't.  I won't.  I'm sitting here with my dog Loki in a garden in London.  And we miss you, and we wish you were here.  There are some people who are big fans of yours right here, sitting across from me.
JS:  Who's there with you who are fans of mine?
MR:  Harvey Weinstein.  David Bailey.  Me and my dog.
JS:  So, I want to actually talk about some stuff that might mean something.  Maybe you've answered these questions a million times.  I don't know.  But how did you end up being an actor?
MR:  Well, I was training for about six years to be a fighter.  I was an amateur fighter, and I got a concussion, and I was told that I couldn't really fight for a while because of the severity of it.  So, for several months I wasn't doing much of anything.  And I was sitting on the beach one day and some high school friend of mine was at the University of Miami was directing a play -- a Jean Genet play, Deathwatch -- and he started talking to me about it.  He said he didn't really care for the actor at the university who was doing the play, and he thought I would be really good to play the part of Green Eyes.  He kind of talked me into it, and when I was doing the play, I thought, wow, this is better than getting up at six o'clock in the morning and running 4 miles a day.  I kind of like it.  And I asked him, "Well, where do you go to learn how to do this stuff?"  And he told me, New York City.
JS:  How old were you?
MR:  I was 18.  So I said, "Will you go with me to New York?"  And he said yes.
JS:  Did he go with you?
MR:  No, he didn't.  So I borrowed $400 from my sister, and I went by myself.
JS:  What was the friend's name who directed you in the play?
MR:  Gary Cox.  He's a waiter in Culver City now.  He went to New York several years after I went.
JS:  Your English teacher was the person who got you into movies, right?
MR:  Yeah, Mrs. Glazer.  She showed me the first movie that I ever saw, A Place in the Sun [1951].
But at the time, being 18, I wasn't fascinated at all by Elizabeth Taylor. I was fascinated by Montgomery Clift, and if I had been in the boat with him, I would have drowned Shelley Winters, too [both laugh].  Anyhow, she showed it twice in class.  I was in B-level class for underachievers.
At that time in Miami, all the Cuban had come over, so I was in a class with a whole bunch of stupid white boys and Cuban guys who didn't understand English, and they used to give us really easy subjects to do.  They'd show us movies.  It was the best class, yeah.  But she was a very sensitive teacher, very understanding too, for those of us that were underachievers.
JS:  How did you get into the Actors Studio?
MR:  It was back in the day when they used to take only three or four people out of thousands.  I was studying at the time with an acting teacher named Sandra Seacat, and I was working on a scene from a Tennessee Williams' play.  It was a scene between a father and son, and I wasn't doing it very well because I couldn't relate to a father figure because I never had one.  So my acting teacher said, "If you want to pass this exam, you need to go an find your father."  And I had only met him once, when I was a boy.  So a day or two before my test, I called up some family members that I didn?t know on my father's side, and I went to upstate New York, and I introduced myself to my father because my teacher told me that it would help with my being able to relate to a father.
JS:  I guess it did, no?
MR:  Yeah, it certainly did -- especially because Elia Kazan [who co-founded the Actors Studio] said it was the best scene he'd seen in 30 years.
JS:  Did you see Al Pacino when you were at the Actors Studio?
MR:  You know, I use to see Pacino there and Chris Walken and Harvey Keitel. I was a kid.  It felt like, finally, for the first time in my life -- outside of a baseball field -- I was home.
JS:  Who were some of the people that meant a lot to you or influenced you or were important to you as young actor?
MR:  As a young actor it was most definitely Brando and Pacino.  And then, shortly afterwards, when Mean Streets [1973] and Taxi Driver [1976] came out it was Robert De Niro.  And then it was Chris Walken and Harvey Keitel.  Those were the guys who made me go, "Wow. I hope I can be those guys in four or five years if I study really hard."  Because I didn?t want to be mediocre, I used to get excited.  I remember as kid, when I wanted to be a ball player, and I saw Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle.  Those were the guys I could relate to.  Then when that didn't work out for me, it was Pacino and De Niro and Walken.  I didn't want to be like the guys at Juiliard; I wanted to be like the guys at the Actors Studio.
JS:  So then things started to happen. Your first film was Body Heat [1981], right?
MR:  I got a two-day scene in Body Heat.
JS:  And in Body Heat, you basically get up and mouth the words to that Bob Seger song, and for the rest of the movie you just disappeared.  But it was just like, who is this guy?
MR:  Well, it was interesting because when I did Body Heat I had gone to Los Angeles, and I had a job as a bouncer at a transvestite night club.  And I remember going to work on the set of Body Heat and then going back to work on the set of Body Heat and then going back to work at the transvestite night club.  I was a strange sort of day.  But it was the beginning.  Then I got Diner [1982], and then, shortly after that 91/2 Weeks [1986].
JS:  Well, you did Rumble Fish [1983] before all that happened.
MR: Yeah, Rumble Fish. I can't remember back then; it's been a while.
JS:  I thought your performance was so great in the movie that I made a painting for you and called it, "A Painting for Mickey Rourke for his performance in Rumble Fish."
MR:  I remember a couple of dozen years ago when we met at the Mayflower Hotel.  You had done this painting, and for years I thought it was another painting.  I was very young and naive because the "Motorcycle Boy" was about motors, and I was trying to find the motorcycle painting.  I remember I was trying very hard to find the Harley Davidson inside your painting, and I couldn't find it. [laughs]
JS:  I remember when I saw you at the Mayflower, we didn't know each other well, but I saw all these really rough-looking guys with you. You had kind of a bumpy ride there for a while.
MR: Well, at that point, I only really felt comfortable around boys from where I grew up, so I surrounded myself with a pretty bad element of people.  That's all I knew.  And eventually I just took myself down. I think I was real good for a lot of years at blaming everybody else for my problems.  But as the years pass by, you have to finally looking in the mirror and go, "You know, it wasn't everybody else.  It was me."
JS:  How low did you get?
MR:  Let me put it this way:  remember all those actors I said I liked?  I told my psychiatrist one time, "Hey, if those fucking guys had to live the way I've lived for the last 10 years, they'd blow their fucking brains out."  And you know what he said to me?  He said, "Mickey, those guys wouldn't know how to fall that far. Only you would know how to fall that far."  As I said, anything that happened I did to myself.  But I was real good at putting the blame on the system.
JS:  Well, a certain kind of vulnerability or inner pain can be a wonderful tool when you tap it as an actor.  But it can also tear you up.
MR:  It can.
JS:  You sort of ended up living this life where you were kind of a tough-guy gangster, but that image was not real.
MR:  Let me put it in a nutshell for you, okay?  I think when you talk about what was tat the core of it all, it was really more shame than it was anger.  It somehow seems more honorable for somebody like me to be angry than to live in shame, but there was a lot of shame.
JS:  Who would you say are the people that you're the closest to and that you feel most comfortable with?
MR:  Right now?  Because I fucked up a good part of my life, I'm really not close to anybody.  I'm closest to my dogs.  The people that I was closest to were the ones I hurt the most, and I only have myself to blame for being numb. When I look at you, for example, I go "Wow, I'd rather have kids like you got than make a great movie or make 10 great movies."  But that's not in the cards for me.
JS:  Who was the person you connected most with in your life?
MR:  My brother Joe.
JS:  And he died, what, six or seven months ago?
MR:  Six months ago, yeah.  There is no lying in my life now because of that.  When I saw Joe go, I decided that life's too short to lie about anything.  When you're sitting there, and you're holding the person that you've been with for 45-odd years, and that person leaves, you just sit there and go, "What the fuck is going on?  Where are you? Talk to me!"  That changes you greatly.  Joe left me a tremendous strength, because he said something to me when the life was going our of him.  He actually looked at me and said, "Hey, bro, you changed.  I never thought you would.  I thought you were always going to be crazy, but you changed."  And it meant a lot for him to see me change.  So, I'm not going to fall again, because I worked very hard to understand that it's not only important for me to keep moving forward but also that Joe wouldn't want me to fail.
JS:  That's right. Well listen, I have to go, but we should continue this.
MR:  Let's talk some more. One more thing that I do want to say is that there was a time several years ago when I would have even been able to talk to you because of where my head was at.  But right now, my relationship with somebody like you is important to me and it means a lot to me.  I used to be only with idiots and bad men.
JS:  Well, listen. I'm going to call you.  Let's pick this up again very soon.
MR:  Sounds good.
JS:  Okay, bye.

JS:  Well, it took a while for us to get back on the phone, but here we are.
MR:  I've been working in the middle of nowhere.
JS:  So, I wanted to talk to you about the stuff you've been doing lately because, from the beginning, when I first saw you, I thought that there was this sense of longing or human beauty that you were able to capture that was what Tennessee Williams was about.  Then, of course, you had to step into juke-dancing obscurity, and the God knows what happened and what the details are.  But coming through that and actually surviving it, it seems like there were other people who really saw the same thing I did, like Francis Ford Coppola, who put you in the movie with Matt Damon [The Rainmaker, 1997], and Sean Penn, who made sure you were in The Pledge [2001].
MR:  And Michael Cimino.
JR:  Yes, and he had his own demons. It's just been very nice to see the kind of support for you that has come from people who are really involved in film making.
MR:  Well, you know, maybe I wouldn't care about that, or it wouldn't have mattered to me.  But I'm appreciative of it right now, where maybe I wasn't for over a decade.
JS:  Well, unfortunately what happens is that when you're very good at doing something, you get very critical of what other people do, and sometimes you say things that are negative when maybe you shouldn't.
MR:  Well, it's not the perfect business to be totally truthful, is it?
JS:  But, at the same time, being truthful is the thing that people respond to in your work.  There was an amazing response to your role as Marv in Sin City, wasn't there.
MR:  Well, I think it's interesting that you brought that up because even with all the makeup and the Band-Aids and the fact that it's a caricature of a particular kind of man -- and I mentioned this to, Robert Rodriguez, who directed the movie -- Marv still had to have layers.  He had to have a soul.  Because so much was hidden with all the bullshit with the makeup and the bandages and the effects, it was important for me to make the character me.
JS:  Who are you?
MR:  Well, it's a guy who has got a sense of humor and who has feelings, and that was important.  And that was a fight.  It wasn't a hard fight because Rodriguez is a pretty intelligent cat.  We're going to do the sequel to Sin City in February, so I'm very excited about that.  You know, these younger directors don't have any fear about working with me, Rodriguez is a younger guy.  He doesn't care about my old reputation, All he cares about is my acting ability, and that's all it should be about.  But I've also realized that I've got to be professional.  I can't surround myself with a bunch of fucking idiots like I used to.  So it's time for me to work again.  People say to me, "What's the best movie you ever made?"  And I say, " I haven't made it yet."
JS: You've chosen to play characters like Marv a number of times over the years-- like Butch in Rumble Fish and Johnny Walker in Homeboy [1988].  I feel like you could play anything, but you got very focused on one kind of character for a while.
MR:  Well, I'll be honest.  Those are the only kinds of characters that really interest me.  The rest of them I find boring.
JS:  What is the role that you really would like to do that would be close to your heart right now?
MR:  I haven't done it yet.  It's out there, I?m sure, calling to me.  I just haven't answered the call.  It's out of my hands, you know?
JS:  So tell me about Domino. What's it all about?
MR:  Domino is inspired by the life of Domino Harvey, this fashion model from London who came over to the States and ended up for a period of time as a bounty hunter.  She was the daughter of Laurence Harvey, the actor.  The story, I think, fell across Tony Scott's desk, and he became very interested in the idea and decided to make a movie inspired by it.
JS:  Tony Scott's been very supportive of your work for a long time also, hasn't he?
MR: Yeah. You know, there were years when Tony and I wanted to work together, but my career was in the toilet, so, thanks to me, we couldn't.  But since we've been putting Band-Aids on things, we were able to get together recently, and Tony's been very supportive.  There are a few directors I've worked with that I can say are actor's directors in the way Tony Scott is.  I mean, any actor worth his fucking salt looked a that interrogation scene with Walken and Dennis Hopper in True Romance [1993] and went, "Man, look what those two boys are doing."  So, Tony's dynamite.  Domino unfortunately, died in a bathtub three months ago at 34 years old.  I went to the funeral, and Tony was speaking about it because he finished the movie, and she never saw it.  I had an incredible experience working with Keira Knightley, who plays Domino in the movie.  She put a lot of trust in Tony's direction, and I think for a girl who's so beautiful to look at, she dug deep and stepped up to the plate and gave a dynamite performance playing a part that, in her day-to-day life, might have been a bit of a stretch for her.  So that was a very cool experience.
JS:  So, you're having a good time living in London right now?
MR:  Yes, I'm looking for a house over here, as a matter of fact.
JS:  You look for houses wherever you go, don't you?
MR:  Yeah, I do.  But I think I've finally found a place where I can have one.
JS:  You'll find a home near me somewhere.
MR:  Well, there's a difference between a house and a home.  I'm looking for a house at the moment.  I remember when I left Miami and moved to New York, it seemed like such a big scary place -- but then that's what was really exciting about it too.  I've never really been the kind of guy to get on a plane and travel to different countries like Spain or England or France.  But now I think it's time for me to get on a plane again and move.  It kind of feels like working before was dangerous for me because I?d feel like I deserved it.  But right now, getting this second chance, I'm working from a better place, I'm just thankful now instead of angry and arrogant, beating on my chest.
JS:  Are you doing any writing these days?
MR: Well, I have, but not at the moment.
JS:  I'm about to get on an airplane to go to San Sebastian, and I'm taking that script you wrote, Wild Horses, to read on the way.
MR:  Well, you should. That only took me 17 years to finish.
JS:  Anyhow, I think the sun rises and sets on you, Mickey.
MR: Oh, yeah.  Okay, brother.
JS:  I'll call you when I'm over in Europe.
MR:  You got it, my man.