The strangest factor about Mickey Rourke’s much-rumoured look on subsequent week’s Celeb Massive Brother is that it hasn’t occurred already. Few legitimately well-known folks really feel extra applicable for a collection that has spent 24 years rounding up the odd geese of popular culture and throwing them right into a home collectively.
The present has lengthy platformed a selected pressure of US celeb, of which Rourke is a card-carrying member. It’s finest embodied by figures corresponding to Tara Reid, Gary Busey, Kirstie Alley and Stephen Baldwin – people whose early recognition as actors had lengthy migrated by the point they entered the home, their celeb finally outlined by tabloid scandal and odd prurience. Was it Busey’s appearing work that made him Massive Brother materials, or his outsized veneers and historical past of dependancy? Reid had American Pie to her title by the point she took half within the present, but additionally tales of LA club-hopping and cosmetic surgery gone awry.
Rourke is simply completely different as a result of he’s fallen from a far increased place. An Oscar nominee in 2009 for The Wrestler, a moody redemption story from Darren Aronofsky that ought to have despatched his profession stratospheric once more, Rourke has by no means been one for skilled self-preservation. His default mode is chaos, every fortunate break trailed by a litany of unhealthy selections: early movie stardom (9½ Weeks, Diner, Rumble Fish) upended by poor private behaviour; comebacks (an Enrique Iglelias pop video, Sin Metropolis) that didn’t pan out; a face repeatedly damaged and stitched again collectively attributable to his enterprise into boxing. After all he’s rumoured for Celeb Massive Brother. The present exists for folks like him, whose proclivity for destruction is simply matched by our eagerness to gawp.
If CBB bosses predict a few of that pressure, although, they might be disenchanted. The Rourke of in the present day is by all accounts a delicate soul, a person calmed by time, whose relentlessly up to date Instagram is dominated by photographs of his canine, photos of wolves, and near-daily tributes to icons of masculinity: Muhammad Ali, Steve McQueen, Bruce Springteen. He usually spotlights the horrors at the moment being inflicted upon Gaza, shares AI-generated photos as egregiously as your grandmother on Fb, and talks in regards to the previous with an endearing wistfulness. “Again within the day,” he captioned {a photograph} of himself and David Bowie in November. “Actually miss his firm.”
It’s simple to envisage a Rourke win on the present, and positively a renewed curiosity in each him and his work. However the bother with Rourke has by no means been the comeback itself; extra the follow-through. Hollywood has all the time made house for him – first when he was a good-looking and laconic twentysomething enjoying unhealthy boys and scoundrels on the flip of the Eighties, then when the new younger administrators of the Nineties and Noughties (amongst them Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Jonas Åkerlund) wooed him again for gruff, memorable supporting roles in movies together with As soon as Upon a Time in Mexico and Spun. After which a lot later, in 2008, when the brutish vulnerability he exuded in The Wrestler recommended a renaissance.
As a substitute he made a Marvel movie in 2010 (the risible Iron Man 2) that left most of his scenes on the chopping room flooring, then burnt additional bridges on his approach right down to straight-to-DVD hell, admitting that he had made quite a few post-Wrestler films “for the cash” and didn’t suppose they had been any good. His latest credit embrace movies with titles like Homicide Motel and Hollywood Heist, and a (non-alliterative) film directed by Roman Polanski that’s but to search out distribution within the UK or the US.
“I keep in mind myself within the mirror and considering, take a look at what occurred to you,” he mentioned in 2003, across the time of As soon as Upon a Time in Mexico, in a New York Occasions profile titled “Mickey Rourke Is Sorry. Very, Very, Very Sorry.” “I had blown all the things, ? I misplaced my credibility, my marriage, my cash, my soul. I mentioned to myself, you’ve bought to alter. And I realised that the appearing was the one factor I had left.” Related expressions of remorse occurred in 1997 and 1998, when he filmed small roles in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rainmaker and Vincent Gallo’s cult indie Buffalo ’66, after which in a while the heels of The Wrestler. He can’t assist himself.
If there’s a hazard to showing on Celeb Massive Brother, it’s that stars can turn out to be crystallised within the British psyche as broken, or susceptible, or the fallacious form of eccentric. Generally a mixture of all three. It was abidingly clear that the Austin Powers actor Verne Troyer had a extreme ingesting downside when he appeared on CBB in 2009 (his dying in 2018 was dominated a suicide by way of alcohol intoxication), and I keep in mind feeling uncomfortable at occasions watching Reid on the present, and later the media character Lauren Harries, and the previous Baywatch actor Jeremy Jackson. All of them got here throughout as barely unhappy, paranoid and confused, people clinging on to reminiscences of their early fame and now stranded within the smoking space of a home in Borehamwood.
It’d actually be bleak to see Rourke endure a equally susceptible stint on the present, nevertheless it’s additionally consistent with a person who’s by no means made issues simple for himself. The least we will do, if he’s to hitch the home on Monday, is deal with him kindly.
