The co-star Bill Murray finds it “complicated” to talk about
His own approach to fame and celebrity may have yielded interesting – and often heated – results, but there’s a former co-star that even Bill Murray finds to be a complicated point of discussion.
This coming from someone who’s developed a habit of showing up in the most unexpected of places to partake in a variety of random activities, forsaken the concept of a phone and agent for the purpose of intentionally making himself difficult to reach, and become embroiled in several notable feuds over the course of his career, that’s really saying something.
And yet, when pressed by Esquire to reflect on his experience collaborating with one of his peers on 2011’s widely-panned drama Passion Play, Murray said, “it’s complicated to talk about Mickey Rourke.” Expanding on his response, the comedy icon put it down to a combination of personal and professional idiosyncracies.
Explaining that “he had all these things he had to do to get himself working”, which included “all kinds of props”, Murray seemed bemused that “when it came down to actually doing a scene with him” it was a lot more straightforward than his intense preparations would indicate, before acknowledging that “the thing about him is the foibles have been personal, not professional.”
After breaking out in a major way throughout the 1980s that had him being celebrated as possessing the potential to go down as one of the all-time greats, a string of poor choices yielded repeated critical and commercial disasters, which saw him turn his back on Hollywood altogether and return to his first love of boxing.
He fared pretty well, all things considered, after notching six victories and two draws from eight professional fights, but his career failed to reach the same heights ever again. Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler may have landed him an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actor’ and sparked a resurgence, but he failed to either maintain or capitalise on that momentum, with the majority of his most recent features being straight-to-video action movies and thrillers.
Murray lamented that “he tried to be a boxer and got his face busted up,” saying “he was a beautiful actor”. Carrying on in that vein, the star remarked that “he was a heartthrob” before making the bold choice to give it all up and try to find success in a new line of work that required him to get punched in the face for a living.
Much like Murray, Rourke has been caught up in some celebrity mud-slinging of his own after taking repeated shots at Robert De Niro and blasting Tom Cruise for being irrelevant, but their fleeting partnership on Passion Play created some complex feelings for the former that he couldn’t seem to shake.
