Last night’s episode of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon was supposed to feature Jessica Alba plugging Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, but she ended up pulling out at the last second because of some food poisoning. Fortunately, her co-star Mickey Rourke just so happened to be returning from his latest trip to visit sick children in Russia within a half hour of the show’s taping, so he brushed off the chance for some rest to do the folks at Dimension Films a solid. Rourke returns as the hulking murderer but all-around sweetheart Marv, and he’s almost as charming as Alba, so it was basically like she was there, but just much older and with a rock star’s stylist’s sense of fashion.
Seriously, he had leather elbow patches on his dress shirt. It’s spectacular.
I’ve included the clip of Rourke talking about Sin City 2 above, but what’s really interesting is that NBC and The Tonight Show excluded Rourke’s explanation of why he had a bag of ice on his knee (and the comment he made about popping a needle in Alba’s butt) and why he was wearing a t-shirt with Vladimir Putin’s face on it while he was in Russia. I’d love to show you the clip, but NBC was even yanking it from Daily Motion within minutes of it posting, so you’ll have to take my word for it.
Rourke had the bag on his knee because he was so tired from his trip that he needed a vitamin shot to stay awake, and it’s typically administered in the butt cheek. But he chose to do it in his thigh instead, because he’s a f*cking maniac like that. As for the Putin shirt, it was for a *looks at what is written on hand* good cause.
Fallon: You just came back from Russia, and there was a lot of flak for you wearing this shirt of Vladimir Putin.
Rourke: Absolutely. Absolutely. (Like he was really proud of it.)
Fallon: Why’d you get in trouble?
Rourke: Last time I was in Russia, Putin had a charity event for the hospital that he supports in St. Petersburg. It’s a cancer hospital. I’ve lost my brother and a lot of close friends to that *BEEP* disease, so I went there and there were these kids there, and not a lot of money, so he invited these celebrities to come over and raise money at an auction. The t-shirt thing, I was walking down the street and saw a big crowd of people and I said, “What’s going on?” and they said, “They’re selling Putin t-shirts” and I said, “For what?” And they said that with all this stuff that’s going on in the Ukraine, there’s a little Ukrainian boy who’s actually in the hospital in St. Petersburg, and his name is (he had to check his hand, because that’s where he wrote it) Xenia, and he’s got a spinal cord injury or spinal… something wrong because he needs all these operations, and Putin promoted this thing to sell t-shirts with his face on them to sell them for money for his operation.
Fallon then expertly broke the awkwardness, as the crowd didn’t clap or even react at all, by making a joke about Rourke’s bicycle pants and then asking him about how he writes his lines on his hands. I’m not really sure why the clip’s not available in its entirety, but I’m assuming that it has to do with the whole world, with the exception of Rourke and Steven Seagal, thinking that Putin is a dick.