“Is this great acting, or has he lost the plot?”: when Mickey Rourke held a casting director at knifepoint
When Mickey Rourke first burst onto the scene in the early 1980s and immediately began earning comparisons to Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro that only served to weigh him down in the long run, intensity quickly became one of his trademarks.
It was easy to see why the newcomer had been spoken of in the same breath as those aforementioned and transformative legends, because he approached his performances with a level of authenticity and effortless naturalism that marked him out as a star with a limitlessly promising future.
Unfortunately, Rourke eventually grew bored of Hollywood’s politics and decided that he didn’t want to act anymore, opting to travel the world as a professional boxer. When he made his comeback to the screen after several years in the wilderness, he was basically forced to start at the very bottom all over again.
By the mid-1990s, Rourke was dismissed as a has-been who turned his back on the business when he was on the cusp of taking his place among the acting elite, but he still knew how to give people the shivers. The downside is that he did it without letting anybody know beforehand, which led to one particularly troublesome audition that may have necessitated a fresh pair of underpants for the casting director.
Simon West’s 1997 action blockbuster Con Air boasted a ludicrously stacked cast of character actors, fronted by Nicolas Cage and his glorious mullet. The supporting players included John Malkovich, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, Danny Trejo, John Cusack, Dave Chappelle, and more, but Rourke wasn’t one of them.
Maybe his audition wasn’t all that great, or maybe it was the fact he whipped out a very real and almost comically large knife when he was testing out for a part, with director West recalling his “particularly harrowing audition” when reflecting on the high-octane extravaganza with Empire.
“He was doing a confrontational scene, and there was this young assistant casting director reading the [Cameron] Poe part opposite him,” he recalled. “Mickey Rourke was eyeball to eyeball, nose to nose with them, and then pulls out this ten-inch Bowie knife from behind him, which was totally real and incredibly sharp. And he held it under this poor guy’s chin.”
Rourke had a reputation for being hot-headed at the best of times, which put West and his cohorts in a state of confusion and fear. “Me and the casting directors froze,” the filmmaker admitted. “Do we intervene, do we wrestle him to the ground? Is this great acting, or has he lost the plot and is going to kill us all? I’m ashamed to say we did not intervene. We let him finish the scene. So it was a pretty powerful audition, that one.”
Instead of inhabiting the Cyrus ‘The Virus’ Grissom part that was awarded to Malkovich in Con Air, Rourke’s 1997 summed up his position. He slummed it with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman in Double Team, reprised his breakout role in dire straight-to-video sequel Another 9½ Weeks, and was thrown a bone by his Rumble Fish director Francis Ford Coppola by way of a bit-part in The Rainmaker.
