{"id":137260,"date":"2025-09-16T09:30:50","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T13:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=137260"},"modified":"2025-09-15T20:52:47","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T00:52:47","slug":"happy-birthday-mickey-rourke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=137260","title":{"rendered":"“When you lose everything, and I mean everything, you sit there in this empty room in the dark, and the only person who can get you out is you.” — Mickey Rourke"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nIt’s his birthday today. <\/p>\n

It’s hard to fully express what he meant to actors who came up at a certain time. You’ll sound hyperbolic. But as a young actor, he was SUCH a meaningful figure. I was obsessed with his gestures, the subtlety of his emotions, his soft voice, the ways he found to dig into scenes through some gesture or interaction with the physical world (the sugar jar in Diner<\/i>!), his devotion to the things we all cared about: truth, story, living believably in imaginary circumstances. There were other figures who came up at around the same time, people who also generated excitement. River Phoenix comes to mind. But River was a child. Rourke was a man. So I followed him for years. Until I stopped. But he left a void, make no mistake. Nobody filled his shoes. <\/p>\n

When word of The Wrestler<\/i> started percolating, I felt an almost unbearable mix of longing, anxiety, and excitement. Listen, you don’t get into acting by being an apathetic person. And the people who mean something to you, mean something to you in the deepest most personal sense. He was one of those guys. <\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\nI wrote about Mickey Rourke at House Next Door, right before The Wrestler<\/i> came out. This is the first piece I wrote that got real attention. Real journalists linked to it, shared it. Real film critics reached out to compliment me. IMDB put a link to it on its homepage, and it stayed there for weeks, until The Wrestler<\/i> hype died down. The piece took on a life of its own. I still get emails about it. That kind of attention has happened to me since (hello, Elvis), but Mickey Rourke was the first. Which seems appropriate, since my love of him goes back to the moment he emerged, and we watched him unfold in real time. All of those feelings are in the essay – which is why I think it hit people so hard. <\/p>\n

Gone Away, Come Back: Mickey Rourke<\/a><\/p>\n

A couple years ago, I wrote a piece literally years in the making, about movie scenes where men look at themselves in the mirror. If you’ve been around here since the beginning, you will remember me posting in, say, 2005, 2006, “I should write about this one day!” Well, I finally did, for Oscilloscope Laboratories<\/a>. Mickey Rourke’s “mirror moment” in Johnny Handsome is included – it’s not only a great example of the device, but it’s one of Rourke’s finest moments. <\/p>\n

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It’s his birthday today. It’s hard to fully express what he meant to actors who came up at a certain time. You’ll sound hyperbolic. But as a young actor, he was SUCH a meaningful figure. I was obsessed with his … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,39],"tags":[291],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137260"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=137260"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201065,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137260\/revisions\/201065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=137260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=137260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=137260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}