It’s been one hell of a year for Mickey Rourke. When he walks into the room you can tell that he knows it. Previously a wholly unpredictable interview subject–at best, provocative; at worst, pugnacious–he graciously greets his interviewer and patiently endures a line of questioning as long as he can have a cigarette at hand, even though he’s dying to get a glimpse of the Yankees-Angels game on the TV in the other room. He’s learned that he can afford to be gracious and patient. After all, he’s officially back.
Once one of the most exciting actors of his generation, Rourke‘s near-legendary and notoriously wild off-screen lifestyle–what he frequently terms ‘going apes**t”–turned his once promising career into a train wreck of epic proportions. But after nearly a decade and a half of battling back his personal demons, the actor has found discipline and rediscovered the love of his craft, and moviegoers have been reaping the benefits. Director Robert Rodriguez in particular rediscovered Rourke for 2004’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico, then saw the blurred line between the actor’s past and Sin City comic book writer-artist Frank Miller’s brutal but noble character Marv for Rodriguez‘s stylish film adaptation this year. Rourke‘s performance even more arresting than the visually stunning film.
Now he’s back as the tough but fatherly mentor to model-turned-bounty hunter Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley) in director Tony Scott‘s hyperkinetic, hallucinatory pseudo-biopic Domino. And in Hollywood.com’s nearly unedited sit-down with the actor, we learned that verbally he’s as much of a straight-shooter as his character is literally–though these days he won’t always pull the trigger if he’s got you in his crosshairs.
What was your first reaction when you read the screenplay for Domino?
Rourke: “I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it because–well, I had a choice. Guy Ritchie had offered me Revolver at the same time that this came around, but Tony Scott kind of gave me a job at a time when it was hard for me to get work. I had a relationship with Tony, and I really liked Revolver because it was interesting and it was out there, and I’m a big fan of Guy Ritchie‘s. The [Domino] material came in and it was written just like a macho, one dimensional, stereotypical bounty hunter kind of guy and I thought, ‘F**k. I don’t even have to read the f**king script to do this thing.’ It wasn’t very challenging and I thought that this was a role that anyone could do. Like I said, I still wasn’t in a place where I could pick and chose what I could do. I was still more or less lucky to get a job at this point, still. I talked to Tony and I said, ‘Look, I’d like to do the movie. It’s not about the money or anything like that. It’s the fact that I don’t think that this character is very well written. I think that it’s very one dimensional. You don’t need me to do it.’ I said, ‘Go hire Joe Blow or whatever.’ Tony said, ‘No, man. I want you to do it. What don’t you like about it?’ I said, ‘Well, whoever wrote it looks like he never f**king left the tennis court or met guys like this.’ Tony heard what I had to say, and said, ‘Well, what do you want to do different?’ I said, ‘Well, he wouldn’t do this. It would be more interesting if he didn’t have the answers for that.’
“Bounty hunters these days–because everything is so sophisticated with computers and surveillance, it doesn’t have to be a one-man-army-type guy who goes in and kicks a door down. Because these days you’re facing the gangs and all the different kind of sophistication and firepower that the bad guys have. You have to be able to match that with intelligence because they have intelligence and surveillance. So it was more like maybe he doesn’t have all the answers, and maybe he’s a little vulnerable. Maybe he’s a little tired of doing this. Maybe he’s feeling out of his element at this point in his life. Maybe he’s uncertain. I wanted to do more of that than to make him a stereotypical kind of guy who walks through bullets. That’s what I think about those kinds of movies. That just doesn’t bite me in the ass the right way. So Tony got that kid who worked with him on the baseball movie and over a two month period us three worked right up until the day of shooting on rewriting the character and rewriting the dialogue and what his relationship would be in a way with Keira, Domino. And especially what my relationship is with Choco, played by Edgar Ramirez.”
Had you met these kind of guys–modern-day bounty hunters–in your life prior to the movie?
Rourke: “Oh, yeah. I mean, you meet these guys everywhere. You meet them in tattoo parlors. You meet them at bike shows. At the fights. At the football games. Wherever. Pumping iron down at Gold’s. That’s the thing about bounty hunters – they could be an out-of-work fireman or it could be a guy who’s a retired football player or a guy who’s an ex-cop or a guy who’s an ex-bad guy. A guy who’s an ex-dentist. There’s no set type. There was a little Jewish guy who was on the set who was the technical advisor. I mean, you wouldn’t think that this guy was a bounty hunter in a million years, but he’s very tactical with his mind. He’s very prepared with his surveillance, with his tactical team. There’s a guy who’s good with hand-to-hand combat, a guy who’s good with surveillance, a guy who’s good with tracking, a guy who’s good with computers, a guy who’s good at giving direction, a guy who’s good at talking a guy down. What I wasn’t knowledgeable about was that they work as a unit in a very methodical way like that, and Tony was very in tune with that, very switched on to that. Also, the fact that, because it was a three-man team, trust is involved–which was interesting in the way that Tony had the relationship with Edgar getting all bummed out about having some chick on the team, and then being attracted to her. So you had the dual element. People said to me, ‘How do you like doing action movies?’ And I don’t like doing action movies, but this one I don’t see it as an action movie. I see it as more of a dramatic movie. I’m pretty positive that I wouldn’t have done this film if it wasn’t Tony, because it would have turned into the other thing very easily.”
In the film your character Ed is something of a father figure for Domino. What was your relationship like with Keira Knightley off-screen?
Rourke: “Sort of like a big brother, really. Keira is like this great-looking f**king beauty, but I just thank God I didn’t look at her that way. I looked at her more like a friend, which was perfect for this. I mean, I saw ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ and the pirate movie, and I liked her quality and her beauty and her grace. It was a breath of fresh air to see her step up to the plate and go outside of herself, and yet work moment-to-moment instinctively and make it personal, and see the rage in her and the fear. I think that she’s a tremendous actress, and I don’t like actresses at all. I really liked her. She turned a corner for me on that. It’ll probably be a long time before I work with someone again that I feel that way about, but, hey, really good actresses don’t grow on trees, especially in this town. I don’t look at her as some sort of fluff that’s on a magazine cover. She’s someone with a lot of integrity that’s very well-read, and I don’t see her some ambitious starlet. She’s like a real woman, a lady that really wants to be as fine as she could be. She’s got a lot of self-respect and integrity, and I admire that in people–and in a lady especially who’s in this f**king business.”
Did you offer her any insight about the dangers of getting caught up in the Hollywood machine?
Rourke: “No, not really. Let me tell you something: I’d be sitting in the makeup trailer and I’d look at her and she’d be reading her third book in two weeks. There was nothing that I could tell this girl. She knows what time it is. I met her mom and I can see why she is the way that she is. She’s very intelligent. She’s a real lady. She’s not one of these c**ts. I have a lot of respect for her as a person and I think that was easy for me to look at her and go, ‘You know what, I don’t want her to get killed. I want her to be the best f**king bounty hunter that she could be, because I want her to live another day.'”
[PAGEBREAK]
Do you feel like we’re at the beginning of a Mickey Rourke renaissance?
Rourke: “Well, I’m not going to get any more chances. This is it for me. So if I f**k this up I might as well jump off the f**king balcony. People say to me, ‘What’s the best movie that you’ve made?’ And I say to them, ‘Hey, motherf**ker, I ain’t made it yet.’ The last time when I almost had a career, I self-destructed before I even got going and I’m not going to make that mistake this time. Those fourteen years were long and painful and shameful and disgraceful and f**king lonely and miserable. Can you imagine being someone who went, ‘Anything going on today? Anything going on today?’ It was that for fourteen years. I mean, it’s like being in purgatory. It is purgatory. I put myself there though. I realized that too, and there were some things that were broken inside of me that I had to fix and repair and change to move forward. But I had to lose everything really hard, and I mean everything the last time around. I do not want to go back there. So every day is an effort for me, because Marv lives inside of me and I have to keep the bastard quiet. Otherwise he wants to raise hell and go apes**t. I’m so fortunate to get another chance, and I’m so grateful that I can even sit and talk to guys like you. I mean, before I was so arrogant and angry and selfish about everything, I had forgotten where I came from. I raced right back to that hell where I once was, where you tried so hard to get out of, and this time around I don’t believe in luck. I worked very hard to change, and I have to seek out people to give me some knowledge to do that and it wasn’t easy because I didn’t want to change and I didn’t know how to change. It’s taken seven, eight years and finally you start to see some daylight in the darkness, but it didn’t come over night. I thought that I could do it in six months or a year. It’s like walking around with no arms and trying to scratch an itch that didn’t go away. I’m just really grateful for the opportunity now. The mistake that I made in the past – well, I was fortunate enough to work with like Adrian Lyne and [Francis Ford] Coppola, Alan Parker and guys like that, but when I would take a job for the money and I didn’t like the script, the script didn’t have any integrity and I wouldn’t have any respect for the director. That’s when I would go apes**t and that’s when all my hell started. It’s because I started to disrespect what I was doing, what I was, what my profession was, and that’s when it all went berserk. So I can only work with people that I respect, material that has integrity right now. As long as I can do that I can maintain the consistency of being responsible, which is what it’s all about right now for me.”
You could call Edgar Ramirez a romantic at heart. The Venezuelan actor makes his American debut in the ultra-stylized, ultra-violent Domino. As Ramirez sees it, the film is as much a love story as it is about anything else.
Hollywood.com spoke with the handsome actor about tackling his role as Choco, one of the real-life bounty hunters Domino worked with. Along with Ed Mosbey (Mickey Rourke), the three of them formed a mighty triumvirate, but Choco’s feelings for Domino ran deeper. Ramirez tells us about his experiences and how he views his chosen field as a way to explore human nature at its core.
How did you get the role?
Ramirez: “I was promoting one of my Venezuelan movies here in U.S. [Punta y Raya]. I was in L.A. for four days at the same time Tony was casting this movie. I got the script and then we arranged a meeting together. We clicked, and three weeks later, he calls me and says, [in a British accent] ‘Dude, you’re on board.'”
Were there any language barriers?
Ramirez: “No, not at all. My father was a military attaché, so I’ve been traveling all my life. I’ve never lived in an English-speaking country ever but I lived in Austria. So, my second language is German. And when I went to school, I had a lot of classes in English. So I learned to talk like this, [doing a British accent] Totally. British with a German accent. ‘Hi, I’m Edgar and I’m from Venezuela and I live in Austria. I’m Hanz and Franz and I’m going to pump you up!’ I used to talk like that.”
How was it working with Tony Scott?
Ramirez: “He has great visual proposals, you know? It’s part of his language, the visuals. It’s part of his story. We shot this with four cameras at the same time. I come from Venezuela, from the independent film arena, and you work with one camera. But working with four was a great challenge because it’s closer to [working on] the stage. You’ve got to be totally in the moment, completely, because you’re covered, all of you, all the action is covered. Although you are there and have to go through the experience with no reservations, with one camera you are working with that one frame at one time. If there’s a shot of just your hand, you concentrate all your energy to that part of the body to get the shot. Four cameras is more like theater, which is great because you are free to give more input.”
It also sounds exhausting.
Ramirez: “It was. [Domino] really kicked me down. It knocked me out totally. Three months, nonstop. And one of the greatest things about working with Tony is that you never know what’s going to happen. So you, like, really have to [put yourself] in his hands and pray to God. To survive the experience. I loved it.”
Did you have to do much research to be a bounty hunter?
Ramirez: “First of all, I had to understand the whole bounty hunting thing, because we don’t have that in Venezuela. Nothing similar at all, at least not legal. I had a hard time reading the script at the beginning. The whole bail and 10 percent, paying your 10 percent of the bail, and then there’s this guy who gives the warrant to the court, and if you don’t show up, they’re going to go after you. The whole thing was a puzzle for me in the beginning. For Keira, too, because they don’t have it in England, either. But once I got through that phase, of embracing it, I wanted to meet Choco. But at that time, Choco was thought to be dead. It wasn’t a sure thing but Tony was told Choco was dead. Later on I found out, through Domino, that he wasn’t dead.”
So there is a real Choco.
Ramirez: “Oh yeah, but I never met him. Tony gave me a letter, a very long and interesting letter that Choco wrote from jail about eight years ago. But the letter stated very well all his visions–about life, the way he interacted with the world, the pain. Being an outsider, being marginalized by society at all levels. And also his tormented relationship with Domino. She was a big drive in his life, had a huge impact on his life.”
[PAGEBREAK]
And what about the real Domino? It’s such a tragic story, isn’t it?
Ramirez: “It’s like dimensions colliding. A movie inside a movie behind a movie. She was a woman with a very strong presence, very intense, very attractive. She had a very strong personality, something very fascinating about her. And inspiring for a movie, a person who decides to explore the dark side of life. To go out of her cage, and then for better or for worse, try to explore the world in an extreme way. She was also very sweet, very tender. And very ‘normal,’ if there is anything normal in life. She spent a lot of time with us on the set. I don’t get this whole controversy about [her not approving the movie]. She was on set but didn’t interfere. I think she felt comfortable.”
The film is very intense. Do you think some will deem it too violent?
Ramirez: “The violence in the movie is the consequence of the things and the conflicts that arise in the movie, is the consequence of extreme measures that are taken in the movie. It’s not just violence for the sake of violence. This is a movie about love more than anything else. Love for your lover, your family, for your friends. And it’s about all the crazy and extreme things we do in the name of love. Love is also a very violent thing. Totally violent. Suddenly, you are, like, at this party your friends invite you to and you meet this person and your life is turned upside down, and the next day you can’t stop thinking about them. That’s violent. Hopefully, it’s for the better, but it’s a violent thing. So I think this movie explores that. This double nature of love, that can be such a creating force and also devastating force. It can take you beautiful places, to a rainbow and you can see stars. And can take you to hell.”
The arm scene [in which Choco blows off someone’s arm with a shotgun] could possibly go down as one of those classic scenes, like slicing the cop’s ear off in Reservoir Dogs
Ramirez: “That was a true act of love. For the rest of guys in the scene, it was Choco doing what he does best. But for him, he just did it because his girl was suffering. It was the best way he knew to get her out of that pain. A bizarre act of love.”
Speaking of your love interest, how was it working with Keira?
Ramirez: “She was great. She was only 19 when she made the movie. She’s very courageous and I find that very sexy.”
And Mickey?
Ramirez: “He is who he is, man. He’s a guy who’s been everywhere, to hell and back, and he keeps that [experience] in his characters, you know? At the same time, he has such a density–and I think that’s what makes him brilliant as an actor. From the very first time I met him, I could feel the energy wave hitting against me, hitting kindly against me. He’s a very sweet guy. And very approachable. He took me under his [wing] and we became brothers in this movie. Which was good because for the movie we were supposed to be that way. He told me if I ever need advice to come to him because he has [made] all possible mistakes. ‘Nobody knows about mistakes better than me.’ And now he’s back doing the movies he loves, that he wants to be part of. I think he’s very comfortable in his skin right now, and that’s a beautiful thing.”
What about your own career? You started out wanting to be a diplomat and now you’re an actor?
Ramirez: “I’m acting for the same reasons I wanted to become a diplomat. I’ve thought about it a lot and concluded that I wanted to become a diplomat because it was a way to explore human nature. For the same reason that at one point in college, I wanted to be a sociologist. So, I think you as a journalist, or a sociologist, anthropologist, psychologist–in the end we are exploring human nature from different angles. So, for me as an actor, maybe it’s the most poetic angle that I have found. Maybe this new curve in my life will take me to different places… no, maybe it’s going to take me on a different ship going to the same harbor. I think I’m headed to same place, maybe in a different ship, with a different crew, but I’m headed in that direction. To find answer and justify and understand why we are here and learn about human nature through my characters.”
Scott Huver and Kit Bowen contributed to this story. Domino opens in theaters Oct. 14.
