The actor who made an enemy of Robert De Niro and paid the price for decades: “He refused to work with me”
If you’re an actor in Hollywood trying to make your way to the A-list, the first rule of ascending the pyramid is not to piss off the people at the top. Even if you already are a household name, it’s best not to get on the bad side of anyone of equal or greater fame. It’s just not a good look and could hurt your long-term prospects. Consequently, if Robert De Niro has enemies, most of them aren’t foolish enough to make their animosity public.
It is quite possible that there are co-stars with horror stories about the Oscar winner. As a noted method actor, he is famous for taking his profession very seriously (at least until the mid-2000s), and his techniques for getting into character could conceivably irritate co-stars. He had a rocky first encounter with Joaquin Phoenix during the production of Todd Phillips’ Joker, but that had more to do with Phoenix’s reluctance to do a table read than De Niro’s eccentric behaviour.
However, there is one actor who despises De Niro and has made it one of the defining traits of his public persona. In 1987, Mickey Rourke starred opposite the Oscar winner in the neo-noir Angel Heart and took an immediate dislike to him. The problem was that the Raging Bull star didn’t want Rourke to talk to him. He wanted to put aside all the collegial chit-chat so that he could stay in character.
Rourke was hurt by this and said that he believed De Niro was actually retaliating against him for giving acting advice. “I took him to school,” the 9½ Weeks actor claimed. “Before that, no other actor took him to school”.
Ultimately, Rourke acknowledged that being rebuffed by De Niro was just painful. “It hurt my feelings a little bit ’cause I looked up to him,” he said. “I don’t look up to him no more; I look through him. I came up from the shit. He doesn’t know that life. I lived that fucking life, so every time I look him in the face, I look right through his asshole.”
It’s unclear how often Rourke has had the opportunity to look at (or through) De Niro lately though, because he was also quick to accuse his one-time co-star of blocking his involvement in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film, The Irishman, more than three decades after their fractious encounter in Angel Heart.
Claiming that Scorsese wanted him to be in the film, Rourke asserted, “The casting person told my manager that Robert De Niro said he refused to work with me in a movie.”
This seemed to come as a surprise to everyone involved in the film. De Niro’s representative issued a statement saying that, according to The Irishman producers and the film’s casting director, “Mickey Rourke was never asked to be in The Irishman nor was he ever even thought of, discussed or considered to be in the movie.”
The fact that this statement essentially invalidated Rourke’s David and Goliath tale of a decades-long feud with one of Hollywood’s biggest stars must have been even more painful than learning that Scorsese hadn’t actually been considering him for a role.
