Back in the Game

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFu8Yz3YgRw[/youtube]

MR: Yeah. I mean, by the end of the shoot, my trainer was pushing me up three flights of stairs to my house and holding my arm like I was an old cripple. I had three MRIs in the first two months of working on the film. I felt like it really was over by the time we started shooting the movie.

CW: The actors love you. You know that. And you must be feeling that right now.

MR: Well, you know, look at it this way: I was pretty much out of work for 13 or 14 years, and toward the tail end of my sort of exile . . . I mean, I took the five and a half years off to go back and do the boxing, and then it was still seven or eight years before I started to work a little bit. [Steve] Buscemi gave me something to do in Animal Factory [2000] and then [Sylvester] Stallone gave me something in Get Carter [2000] . . .

CW: You were amazing in Sean Penn’s film The Pledge [2001].

MR: When I did Sean Penn’s movie, I think I was living in, like, a $500-a-month room, and someone called me up or bumped into me and asked me if I’d come up to work for a day. That sort of got me going a little bit. But it wasn’t until Sin City [2005] that I kind of got back into the game.

The MR is Mickey Rourke. The CW is Christopher Walken. The source is Interview Mag, via ONTD.