Mickey Rourke Sure Doesn’t Seem To Like Summer Movie Box Office Champ Tom Cruise, Whom He Calls ‘Irrelevant’

It’s been a while since Mickey Rourke appeared in a big movie that lots of people saw. Meanwhile another actor who first broke though around the same time is having the biggest hit of his career. Tom Cruise is the movie star of the summer thanks to Top Gun: Maverick, a movie he wouldn’t let execs dump on a streamer after the pandemic began. But that doesn’t impress Rourke much.

The Oscar-nominee, whose bumpy (and sometimes brilliant) career is matched by an eccentric personality, appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, where he inevitably dropped some hot takes. When Morgan asked Rourke what he thought about Cruise having a smash hit (that’s going to make him even richer), Rourke was decidedly unmoved.

“That doesn’t mean s*it to me,” Rourke replied. “The guy’s been doing the same effing part for 35 years.” He added, “I got no respect for that.”

He wasn’t done. “I don’t care about money and power,” he said. “I care about when I watch Al Pacino work and Chris Walken and De Niro’s early work and Richard Harris’s work and Ray Winstone’s work. That’s the kind of actor I want to be like. Monty Clift and Brando back in the day.”

Morgan then asked him if he thought Cruise was “a good actor.” He did not. “I think he’s irrelevant, in my world,” Rourke said. Morgan stared at him for a few seconds, then gave him a withering-sounding, “Fascinating.”

Perhaps Rourke is not a fan of how Cruise has shifted his career into almost exclusively action movies in which he almost kills himself to entertain. Maybe he wishes he’d go back to the dramas that largely comprised his career for years — movies like The Color of Money, Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July, A Few Good Men, and, of course, Cocktail.

But now that he’s officially in his 60s, Cruise could return to the less death-defying fare. Maybe then and only then will he become relevant, at least to the world’s biggest Law and Order: SVU fan.