God bless you, Mickey Rourke. With all the positive pre-release buzz around The Wrestler, we were bracing ourselves for a bunch of boring profiles on just how healthy and adjusted Rourke is these days — but thankfully, if this piece in today’s L.A. Times is any indication, our fears were completely unfounded!
It’s not so much what he says as it is how he says it: the casual asides about “a restaurant in the West Village that my friend Julian Schnabel turned me on to,” or the way his personal trainer would rouse him from sleep in his hotel room “even if I had three girls in my bed.” Okay, maybe it is what he says.
Rourke apparently has six Chihuahuas, one of them nicknamed Jaws (a.k.a. Little Mickey), who he rescued from certain death at an animal shelter. “It had been badly abused and was totally uncontrollable, always foaming at the mouth and growling at anyone that tried to come near him. So, of course, Rourke tried to give him a kiss and Jaws bit his mouth. ‘There was blood everywhere. It looked like I’d been hit by a car. I had to go get stitches. But I kept him.’”
