Every week, Bor Beekman, Robert van Gijssel, Merlijn Kerkhof, Anna van Leeuwen or Herien Wensink take a stand in the world of film, music, theater or visual arts.
A conversation about politics with the stars rarely yields anything. Except of course with Mickey Rourke. The often fallen actor, the 69-year-old face nowadays a kind of Mickey Rourke mask, greenish tattoos on the partially bare torso, video called interviewer Piers Morgan. The title of his show, Piers Morgan Uncensoredturned out after a salvo fucks from the guest not quite up to par: ‘Mickey, I have to ask you to watch your language.’
Previously it was about Tom Cruise. “Irrelevant,” Rourke thought. ‘He’s been doing it for 35 years fucking same.’
Then Morgan started talking about cancel culture: ‘Mickey, what do you think about this strange phenomenon?’
‘About what?’
†Can-cell culture†
‘No opinion.’
Trump, with whom Rourke has been in a feud, has been going on ever since the real estate baron sent him and rapper 2Pac a $28,000 bill after a stay at one of his hotels got out of hand. It was scandalous, Rourke thought: ‘I would have caused no more than $6 or $7,000 in damage. And 2Pac nothing.’
He also wanted to say as little as possible about Trump: “I don’t want the secret service to visit me again.” Rourke had promised the then-incumbent president a “left hook.”
On to Vladimir Putin, also a well-known one. “You wore a T-shirt with his portrait on it,” Morgan recalled. “Yeah, that was then,” the actor emphasized.
Those were different, happier times. Western stars flew in for a charity gala evening in St. Petersburg, where Putin made his way through with KGB accent Blueberry Hill sang to an over-enthusiastic audience: Kevin Costner, Gérard Depardieu, Mickey Rourke. The president also danced with Sharon Stone.
Rourke: ‘He invited me to visit a home for small children with incurable cancer with him. Heartbreaking. I looked at Vladimir. I saw a genuinely concerned man, with empathy.’
“But Mickey,” Morgan asked, “how do you reconcile that with the man who illegally invades Ukraine and bombs little children every day?”
“I can’t reach that,” Rourke acknowledged. “I wish a bell would ring in his mind and heart. I saw images of an old man, his house was bombed, five relatives dead. All he had left…’
The actor rubbed tear fluid from his eyes, put on sunglasses. ‘All he had left was a little gray kitten. I saw that image, that fucking image – sorry.’
Rourke savagely tossed a water bottle away. ‘I saw it with my own eyes: the empathy in Vladimir. But that was in the orphanage. Something has changed… all the mutilation, the deaths, the murders…’
World leaders don’t listen to Hollywood. But asking the question couldn’t hurt, Morgan decided: did Mickey have a message for Putin?
“You don’t have eternal life,” Rourke said. ‘Look at what happened to Peter the Great and Napoleon when they wanted more and more. Let the people of Ukraine be independent, in the democratic society they want to live in. And stop. Not tomorrow, but now.’