In Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (2008), Rourke plays a onetime titan of the tights who now lives in a trailer park and, with a weakened heart and a body ravaged by years of flying elbows and steroid use, is out for some redemption of his own. Watching Rourke onscreen now—older, odder, beefier, his features more rugged from years of fighting and surgery-is actually strangely comforting, like some great wrong has been righted, even if the wrong in question was in part his own doing. He looks more physically imposing, but gentler in a way. He also seems somehow to have more power, some of it magic and some of it tragic, doing the kind of work he was meant to do, the kind of work people wanted him to do, the kind of work other people can’t do-at 56 years and numerous lives old, doing the best work of his career.

Christopher Walken, who has known Rourke since their days at the Actors Studio in the mid-’70s, recently caught up with him in New York.

CHRISTOPHER WALKEN: I wanted to ask you about growing up in Miami, because when I was a kid in the ’50s my father used to take us there. South Beach was where the inexpensive hotels were. Is that where you were? Collins Avenue near Wolfie’s coffee shop and everything?

MICKEY ROURKE: Yeah, yeah. It’s funny that you mention that, because when I was a kid and I was doing amateur boxing, Wolfie’s was right on the corner. So on nights that I’d be up really late and go to Wolfie’s, I’d see all of Angelo Dundee’s —fighters—like Muhammad Ali and Jimmy Ellis and Jerry Quarry, and all these guys would be there eating after they ran. They used to run on the golf course down there, and then they’d go to Wolfie’s and have eggs and shit.

CW: South Beach was where the cheap hotels were, right?

MR: Yeah, absolutely. They used to call it the Elephant’s Graveyard.

CW: In the ’50s, you could take your car on a boat and go to Havana . . . Anyhow, I’ve been reading some stuff about you that I didn’t know. I didn’t know you were originally from Schenectady.

MR: Upstate New York, yeah.

CW: And then you moved to Florida. And then you had your first career kind of in sports. And then you got into acting. Well, I never knew you were on the stage. What was it, a Jean Genet play?

MR: Yeah, I probably did a dozen plays, like Off-Off-Broadway stuff. And the Genet play was the first one I did. What the fuck was it? [pauses] Deathwatch.

CW: A lady got you into that? A teacher?

MR: You know what it was? It was actually a kid from my football team in high school who was going to the University of Miami. He was directing a play, and he didn’t like the leading man—or the leading man quit, or he fired him—and I was sitting on the beach one day, and he said, “Hey, man, I’m doing this play at the university.” I said, “Well, I’m not going to the university.” He said, “Yeah, but nobody will know it.” So he put me in the fucking play. And I liked it. I really liked it a lot. I had gotten injured during the boxing, and I was supposed to take several months off because I’d had a couple of concussions, and so I sort of just left the boxing and got into the acting by accident after I did that play.