Today, in unlikely celebrity feuds, we have Mickey Rourke and Robert De Niro, who have not been on good terms since 1987’s Angel Heart. While appearing on the Italian TV show Live – Non è la D’Urso (which Google tells me translates to “Live – It’s not D’Urso” — not helpful, either), The Wrestler star claimed he didn’t get a role in The Irishman — Martin Scorsese’s long-in-the-works mob epic — because Bobby D? Not a fan.
“Marty Scorsese wanted to meet me for a movie with Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, and Robert De Niro,” Rourke claimed. “The casting person told my manager that Robert De Niro said he refused to work with me in a movie.” He added that he’s upset about kept out of the film because he “needed the money” (the last Mickey Rourke movie to break $15 million at the box office is Immortals, released back in 2011). What happened between the actors, both of whom have been nominated for Academy Awards?
He “looked up” to De Niro like Marlon Brando and Al Pacino back in the 1980s, but changed his view after De Niro allegedly told him on the Angel Heart set: “I think it’s better if we don’t talk.”
De Niro wasn’t the only one on the Angel Heart set to struggle with Rourke. The film’s director, Alan Parker, called working with him “a nightmare. He is very dangerous on the set because you never know what he is going to do.” Rourke, meanwhile, says that he longer looks up to De Niro, he looks “through him… I came up from the sh*t. He doesn’t know that life. I lived that f*cking life, so every time I look him in the face, I look right through his asshole.” So, I’m guessing Rourke won’t be seeing Joker on opening night?
The Irishman releases on Netflix on November 27, 2019.
(Via The Independent)
