The actor who was too scared to work with Mickey Rourke: “Lost his balls, really”
In 2011, a Mickey Rourke movie, Passion Play, received a limited theatrical release in the United States. The release was so minimal and the reviews so caustic, in fact, that the film made less than $4,000 at the box office. It was a disastrous fate for a movie its director had wanted to make for 20 years, and relatively surprising given that the cast also included recognisable names like Megan Fox, Rhys Ifans, and Bill Murray. One star dodged a bullet when he was replaced by Murray after initially being cast in the movie, though – even if the Ghostbusters icon accused him of losing his balls.
In the early ’90s, screenwriter Mitch Glazer wrote the first draft of Passion Play, a quirky drama about a jazz musician on the run from a mobster who stumbles upon a travelling circus and meets a beautiful woman with wings growing from her back. Over the next decade, Glazer penned the Al Pacino/Colin Farrell film The Recruit and created the Jeffrey Dean Morgan-led TV series Magic City before finally getting the chance to direct his long-gestating passion project—no pun intended.
When it came to casting the film, Glazer went to his old pal Rourke, who he’d known since their days at Miami Beach High School, to play the jazz man. He then saw some early scenes from Jennifer’s Body and knew Fox was the woman to play the beguiling angel Lily. For the gangster Rourke is on the run from, though, Glazer made an unusual choice: young English actor Toby Kebbell.
At that point, Kebbell was on the rise in Hollywood. He first burst onto the British scene with Shane Meadows’ grim 2004 thriller Dead Man’s Shoes before taking the lead role in Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla and transitioning to Hollywood with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Casting him as a menacing figure capable of intimidating someone like Rourke was a potentially fascinating choice – but then he dropped out of the film only nine days before shooting began.
Luckily, Glazer had another hugely famous celebrity with whom he was good friends. He called his old buddy Murray, whom he first met in 1977 when he wrote an article about Murray’s SNL co-star, John Belushi. Murray gladly agreed to come on board the project and even took the opportunity to anonymously throw shade Kebbell’s way.
“I have this friend of mine now, Mitch Glazer,” Murray told GQ, “Who wrote a screenplay that he wanted to direct. And some actor jumped; just got terrified at working with Mickey Rourke. Just jumped. And lost his balls, really.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kebbell never publicly commented on whether Murray was correct in his assessment.
Amusingly, though, in that same interview, Murray admitted that his friend had previously asked him to play another part in the movie, but he turned him down. Murray explained: “The open part was much more interesting than what he originally wanted me to play. The movie is such a long shot. So impossible. But I live to go down with those guys that have no fuckin’ chance.”
To everyone’s chagrin, Murray was correct about the movie being a long shot. However, its critical and commercial failure, coupled with Kebbell’s late abandoning of the project, weren’t to be the only dramas Glazer had to face. After the movie was released, New York Magazine interviewed Rourke, and he claimed the production was terrible, and that the film wasn’t widely distributed because it was “not very good.”
After these comments were published, though, Rourke contacted the outlet to say, “When I talked to you, I was at a party. It was loud and crowded, I was in a shitty mood, and I was trying to get rid of your reporter.”
The repentant star, clearly worried that he’d upset his pal, added, “Mitch is one of my best friends since we were kids. I loved working with him and would do it again tomorrow. I don’t know why I said that stupid shit.”
