Over Golden Globes weekend, many of the major Sunset Boulevard and Beverly Hills hotels were hosting A-list events for boldfaced nominees and their luxury-house sponsors.
Yet on the evening before the big Hollywood gala, Mickey Rourke — who had won the Golden Globe in 2008 for best actor for his adrenaline-fueled comeback role in The Wrestler — was checking out of the Sunset Marquis hotel after a six-day stay, hefting not a statuette but his duffel-stuffed belongings, to a temporary apartment in L.A.’s Koreatown. In tow was his trio of rescue dogs. He had been ousted from his Beverly Grove house and had needed some pampering room and board.
Rourke, something of a stray himself, has had a long history of alternately living the life of Riley in lavish homes he owned from New York City to Beverly Hills, then eking it out like a regular Joe in random rentals that he couldn’t afford.
It’s been a strenuous 18-year fall from grace since Susan Sarandon handed the magnificent disaster his Golden Globe, his longtime buddy Bruce Springsteen mugging with glee as a standing ovation crowd cheered him on. He beat Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio that year. Both were visibly thrilled for his win over them. Later that winter he’d also be nominated for an Oscar.
Now Mickey Rourke is Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd, sans decrepit manse, unready for the close-up he’s been brutally receiving. Rourke’s woes managed to pierce through an unusually busy news cycle in the first few weeks of the new year: kidnapped Venezuelan dictators, murdered Iran protesters, killed U.S. protesters, Greenland incoming and all.
Rourke has been evicted twice in 12 months: First, the bedraggled but never dull (and still muscular) 73-year-old curiosity was knocked down and tossed back to L.A. last April by his B-list roomies in London’s Celebrity Big Brother House, a studio-lot luxury front created for the Truman Show-like reality series. That was after being given formal notices to curb his “unacceptable behavior” and use of “offensive” language.
Then, in Los Angeles earlier this month, his locks were changed and the actor is now in need of a new permanent home to hang his designer cowboy hat and coddle his pets.
As a 30-year chronicler of his career, I’ve gotten to spend time with him and sort of know him. If it’s any consolation to the internet legions shocked by his current flirtation with homelessness, this isn’t Rourke’s first eviction rodeo or bout with penury. In the past, when things turned, he has sold off trinkets like gold-plated Rolls-Royces and custom motorcycles to pay his bills. Now, however, no such luck.
There’ve been worse A-list offenders before him who had won the lottery of celebrity then blew it. But Rourke is perhaps the first to become the recipient of a GoFundMe campaign to cover his back rent. Within days $100,000 had been raised to pay a $59,000 debt he owed on a $7,000 L.A. rental, which looked like it was worth about $1,500 per month. His manager, film industry veteran Kimberly Hines, whose office set up the GoFundMe, now says that it is uninhabitable and that Rourke is filing a countersuit against the landlord, claiming that the house was covered in mold and that essential appliances weren’t operational.
Most of the thousands of donations were presumably from fans, in the form of $5, $10, or $25 handouts. More prominent donors offered more, including the “Me Too”–accused producer Brett Ratner, who coughed up $2,000.
A day after the media frenzy, Rourke posted a video on his website, denying that he approved the GoFundMe, seemingly confused about what a GoFundMe even was. He insisted the drive was set up unbeknownst to him.
Soon after, there he was checking into the Sunset Marquis.
***
The cruel paparazzi shot accompanying the latest headlines had a lot to do with the wellspring of sympathy for Rourke. Here was the former ‘80s sex symbol, hair sparse and white, and gripping Taco Bell delivery bags outside his modest three-bedroom Spanish bungalow rental, appearing like an aged version of Cher’s son in Mask. Online comments on images kept expressing shock that he was “unrecognizable,” despite that it is how he has looked for nearly 20 years, when he’s not wearing extensions.
“Mickey cares about his looks,” Hines, his manager of 10 years, told me in a conversation this past Friday from Rome, where she has a home. “His hair isn’t thick, but he’s not sick.” In other words, he is in full working condition.
In denying any involvement with the GoFundMe, Rourke said in his Instagram video that he would sooner put a gun in his butt and shoot it before accepting a nickel. (No thanks for that image.) Shortly after making the threat, he surrendered a shotgun to the sheriff’s office for safe keeping until happier days.
“It’s an old shotgun he didn’t use anymore,” said Hines. “It wasn’t because he was suicidal. To him, just doing the right thing. I told him it wasn’t the greatest of timing. The public saw the admonition as a red flag. But Mickey does what he does. His friend Frenchie took the shotgun from the Marquis to the Sheriff’s Department in Hollywood.”
In a follow-up posting last weekend, Rourke further ramped up the mercurial tone, writing: “There will be severe repercussions to [the] individual who did this very bad thing to me.” (Rourke was referring to the charity platform.) “And anyone who knows me knows payback will be goddamn severe!!!!!!”
In a long career as a film producer, as well as an industry agent, publicist and manager, Hines has worked at CAA, Industry, 3 Arts, Framework Entertainment and the David Unger-founded AIA (Artist International Group, now IAG). In 2023 she was named a partner at AIA. She now has her own firm, she says, with 39 clients, directors and actors.
Besides Rourke, she has worked as a producer with Nick Nolte, Alec Baldwin and Matt Dillon and in one role or another with Chris Rock, Jeremy Piven, Gina Gershon, Jennifer Beals and German movie star Til Schweiger.
Considering all those big names, she appeared to be at her wits’ end with Rourke these days. She has repeatedly said that her client absolutely did sign off on the fundraising appeal. (It should be noted that in his rants he never mentions Hines in connection with the GoFundMe campaign, which he has called “a scam.”)
Hines paid out of pocket, she asserts, for his hotel, his U-Haul move, the rent and security deposits for his new Koreatown apartment, his PetCo runs and his four storage units.
To get Rourke on record and perhaps clear up the he-said-she-said of it all, THR reached out to his decades-long entertainment lawyer Bill Sobel, whose offices are located on Sunset Boulevard. He has not responded as of press time.
When I asked Hines to provide me with Rourke’s number so I could speak with him directly, she texted me what she presented as his response: “No fuck them all don’t talk to anybody its [sic] not a good fucking time to talk about me. Especially you. Don’t talk to a goddamm soul!!! I hope you listen to me!!!!”
Then, per Hines, he moved on to other business: “Oh I forgot to tell me [sic] how many wardrobe changes in next film. I’ll give you a number after you find out!!!”
This past Monday, despite his avowed aversion to press, Rourke talked to TMZ, which caught up with him at his gym. He told the outlet that “a person who worked for him” had set up the fundraiser for “her” personal gain, evidently referring to Hines though still not mentioning her name. By the end of this week or sooner, Hines, who showed THR a note from GoFundMe agreeing to fulfill all refunds, said all moneys should be returned to donors without them having to request it.
“Mickey is a very emotional person and this is not the first or last time he will throw me under the bus and not even realize what he did,” says Hines. “I’m not going to acknowledge this noise, as I did nothing wrong. I’m in the midst of negotiating three deals for Mickey and we are in constant touch all day long. The money was meant to help him.”
Of his many storage units, “I ask him why he needs all this stuff?” she says. Hines added that she had hoped he would accept the money and start living reasonably, within his means. But hours after checking in to the hotel, he had already spent $400 in incidentals, she said.
According to Hines, Rourke said he will only take gigs that will pay him at least $200,000 per day, adding that he has neither a credit card nor a bank account and like a dive bar he accepts “cash only.” (For comparison’s sake, he was offered $250,000 for his role as a Russian mutant-villain in Iron Man 2, post-Wrestler. Pretty lowball for Hollywood. Reportedly, Robert Downey offered to give him some of his paycheck and it was at least tripled.)
“I find it very difficult,” says Hines. “I’m not his mommy. The only one that can help Mickey is Mickey, if he continues to repeat the same mistakes. His wake-up call is in the last hour. A painter should be a painter. Mickey should act. The door for him is slightly ajar but it won’t stay there long. He doesn’t have a normal relationship with money.”
Then the door opened further this week, according to Hines, who texted me: “Mickey agreed to two films I bought [sic] him!! Thankfully.”
One of them has been greenlit of this Wednesday. Director and screenwriter Frank Perluso has signed on, along with Rourke, according to Hines, to make a film in which Rourke plays an aging bigot who reveals the unexpected vulnerability beneath his rough exterior, à la Gran Torino. Hines says that Rourke’s pay is “in the ballpark” of his demands.
***
Rourke, who grew up as a kid in upstate New York but later moved in with his father in northern Miami’s Liberty City — a low-income housing project corridor known for high crime — once told me that someone had abused him and his younger brother when they were little and that his bodybuilder dad was a hot mess, no picnic. He did not elaborate on the latter, but shed a tear. “You can’t concentrate on hitting a curveball when you’ve got Halloween III going on at home,” he said. “I’m not going to say dysfunctional, because it was beyond that. I can’t even put a word to it. I never got encouragement from anybody.”
As a young, aspiring actor, he worked all kinds of gigs — a cruise-ship dishwasher, a flyer guy for a Times Square massage parlor at a time when pimps and peep shows ruled the Rialto. He said he didn’t leave the Miami area to make it in the picture shows but to avoid being killed. There was heat on his feet. “When I was in acting school,” he told me. “I stayed in hotels where my rent was $30 a week, and I could barely make payments.”
His relationship with money didn’t get better with age and he faced evictions and court defaults multiple times in his long and intermittently flourishing career. In that time, he’s lived in a succession of grand lodgings he reworked, lifting cherub appointments, dark woods, elaborate wall coverings and other details from his favorite international hotels, while adding louche touches that mirrored his raffish image.
I’ve always enjoyed his candor, poetic vulgarity, sense of chivalry and his Brando-meets-James Dean delivery and comportment. In 2008, the year TheWrestler came out, I wrote an in-depth profile on the Actor’s Studio thespian who rose to fame as a scene-stealing ensemble actor, beginning and lasting through the ‘80s in films such as Body Heat, Diner, Rumblefish, then as a Pacino-level leading movie star in 9 1/2 Weeks, Angel Heart, Barfly, The Pope of Greenwich Village and Johnny Handsome before his career and film choices took a turn.
When I met him for that story, he was living in an un-showy 19th century brownstone walk-up in Manhattan’s West Village. The interior was bordello chic: layered Diana Vreeland reds, original chandeliers and parquet floors sharing space with punching bags and bench presses as well as a stripper pole, loaded coffee-table handguns and a formidable wall-mount suction-cup dildo he called “Little Mickey.” On “Taco Thursdays,” Modelos were knocked over by his yapping dogs. The Pope of Greenwich Village, days before his Wrestler accolades poured in, was at home, seemingly at peace and chill: the comeback kid in repose.
Our multiple interviews over three weeks at that time were conducted on his porch stoop with his beloved 17-year-old Chihuahua-terrier dog Loki in arms, and neighbors saying hi like actual neighbors, not autograph hounds. (One of his six dogs from that time, Jaws, remains among the living.)
After my time with him he moved to a TriBeCa loft where, according to the New York Post, he left an alleged back-rent of roughly $32,000, with $10,000 in damages, upon the place and un-approved disco lights installations as well as punched-in walls. Then he bought a first-floor “pied-a-terre” on the Upper West Side, which was decorated by the acclaimed interior designer David W. Purdie. The building was by the architect of the Plaza Hotel and the fabled Dakota on Central Park West. That part-time sanctuary was featured and heralded in Architectural Digest. He sold that sprawl for nearly $14 million in 2009, according to realtor.com and others.
Some time in his gold-rush ‘80s, according to Architectural Digest, he had bought and renovated Bella Vista, the legendary 1920s Med-Rev estate (complete with opium den) that John Barrymore (grandfather of Drew) once owned and rented to Katharine Hepburn. Rourke owed on rentals elsewhere.
Didn’t work out. Homeownership, it turned out, was not his thing. “I’ve never lived in a house I’ve felt comfortable in,” Rourke told AD. “Yet I always feel creative and comfortable in special hotels… My mind works differently. In my movie contracts I always put it in that I can pick my own hotel.”
Hotel or not, Rourke, back in Manhattan, seemed very much at home. “All he talks about is getting back to New York, or moving to a Texas ranch–never staying where he is,” says Hines.
In his Village brownstone in 2008, Rourke was keeping house with actual friends from his past (Entourage in real life). His Miami buddy, the late J.P. Parlavecchio, a former chef-restaurateur who used to bring Rourke lasagna when they were coming up together, lived in the den-like basement and prepared daily meals for Rourke’s dogs, as the actor would mostly order delivery. Or Rourke would hop over to fancy spots like Keith McNally’s Morandi or then-Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s The Waverly Inn, where he often held court with his ill-advised buddy Harvey Weinstein, who lived across the street. Truffled macaroni and cheese (then about $65) and the like. Later on, some nights at his house, a fist of a man would come by to deliver a black tank of whey protein the size of a mini keg to bulk Rourke up.
For all his excess and eccentricity, I’ve never seen Rourke do cocaine or dig deeply in his cups, unlike many famous trainwreck actors I’ve spent time with over the years.
Of that off-Seventh Avenue neighborhood, Rourke then told me: “We know everyone from six brownstones down from left to right. And everyone’s got a dog. It’s like I’m back in my old nabe of 20 years ago,” when he was filming The Pope of Greenwich Village in the area.
“I never knew my neighbors for 15 years in L.A. — not one of them. I hate that fucking city. I hated it the first day I got there, and I hated it the last day I was there too.”
Why he ever left his beloved New York and moved back to a Los Angeles he’s always professed to loathe is anyone’s guess.
It was incidentally in Los Angeles that I’d first met Rourke. It was in 2000, and he was living in a non-descript house above the Sunset Strip with bodybuilder friends popping by. Barbells everywhere. It was not the kind of place you’d imagine a celebrated Hollywood actor living in. Clothes were in piles. Furniture? Not really. He was vulnerable but cocksure and provided me invaluable contacts for getting Vanity Fair interviews with like-minded, misunderstood misfits like the original Oakland chapter members of the Hell’s Angels and the reclusive, cosmetically augmented director Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate), the latter of whom Rourke now looks an awful lot like. (Shape-shifters, Hollywood messes are. Yet we love to see their rises and falls.)
More than a week since Golden Globes night, well after the hangovers have subsided and the cucumber masks have been removed, it appears many directors, actors and investors will be looking at Rourke with a sobering eye.
“When Mickey is flush, he is extremely generous,” said Hines. “He loves his leather pants, his shirts, his hats, his jewelry. Maybe he should be a fashion designer. Nobody puts themselves together like him. On a plane once he gave me a ring he said David Bowie gave him. I looked it up. It was Bowie’s.”
“He will give you the shirt off his back.”
Why does she stay hopeful and loyal? “If I wanted a normal job, I’d go work at a flower shop. It’s what I know to do. It’s hard to shake him, because he is one of the last iconic actors.”
