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Thu 12 March 2026 21:15, UK
While it’s always interesting to hear about which movies leading actors decided to turn down at some points in their career, Will Smith and The Matrix, Matt Damon and Avatar, Al Pacino and Star Wars, for example, it’s probably most interesting to consider which actor has turned down the most box office hits in total, costing them an absolute king’s ransom in wages.
And it’s a fair shout to say that this very dubious honour should go to Mickey Rourke.
Rourke has always been, shall we say, a colourful character, as likely to find himself arrested or partaking in Celebrity Big Brother as he is to trouble the Oscars. Now in his 70s, he has, however, occasionally managed to put in some genuinely excellent performances in films including The Wrestler and Sin City.
The peak of his fame came in the 1980s, after a movie-stealing appearance in 1981’s steamy erotic thriller Body Heat alongside Kathleen Turner led to his being cast in the following year’s Diner, a comedy-drama from Rain Man’s Barry Levinson that earned Rourke industry awards and widespread acclaim.
Francis Ford Coppola then cast him in Rumble Fish in 1983, and then, when Rourke made 9½ Weeks in 1986, it became a global hit, bringing in ten times its budget at the box office and cementing his standing as one of the most in-demand male actors in Hollywood despite only really having had one breakout success as a lead. But his next film, Angel Heart, with Robert De Niro, disappointed at the box office, and it was around that time that Rourke made some of the worst career decisions he could possibly have made.
According to the New York Times, who interviewed him just as his late career highlight, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler was reminding movie goers who he was after a long time out of the spotlight, Rourke said no to appearing in some of the most successful films of the ‘80s and ‘90s, including the Eddie Murphy movies 48 Hrs and Beverly Hills Cop, plus Rain Man, Pulp Fiction, The Silence of the Lambs, Top Gun, Tombstone and Platoon.
Instead, he chose to spend 15 years or so making films that famously few people went to see (“only six” according to the actor), although he did have more success, very specifically, in France, where they decided he was some kind of second coming of James Dean, leading Rourke to say that French audiences were more enlightened than Americans.
“I have no idea why I said that,” added Rourke years later.
His choices, plus issues in his personal life, led to years in the wilderness, before he was cast in Robert Rodriguez’s 2005 comic book noir Sin City as Marv, a character that the creator Frank Miller described as ‘Conan the Barbarian in a trench coat’. His comeback was widely praised, and when he followed it up with Aronofsky’s 2008 movie about a battered and bruised veteran wrestler getting back into the ring while physically failing, a raft of awards followed, including a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actor’ and an Academy Award nomination.
His moment back in Hollywood’s favour was fleeting, however, and although he won a part in Marvel’s Iron Man 2 in 2010, he found further major roles hard to come by, making mostly straight-to-streaming films for the next 15 years.