Remember Body Heat ? Remember the sweet-faced arsonist with the soft, sexy voice? That was Mickey Rourke in his breakthrough film role. But you might not recognize him in his latest film The Wrestler (opening in San Diego in January) in which he plays a beat up and tired veteran of the wrestling circuit. Yesterday the San Diego Film Critics Society gave Rourke its Best Actor award for his amazing work. The film is the fourth by indie director Darren Aronofsky and he fought to cast Rourke as Randy "The Ram" Robinson.
"I was always interested in casting Mickey," Aronofsky says, " but it was pretty tough to find the money with Mickey involved. No one thought he was a sympathetic performer. He's been playing tough guys for the past fifteen years but if you look at his work from the eighties it was just so rich and dangerous yet incredibly vulnerable and sexy, and it's a strange mix that you don't get that often."
Check out the the trailer, courtesy of Fox Searchlight, to get a taste of what his performance is like.
