Rick’s Rants and Raves

This afternoon on my way home from work, I listened to part of an interview with Darren Aronofsky, the director for The Wrestler.

At 23:20

Fresh Air host Terry Gross: Now he has the kind of muscle in this film that you usually need steroids to get, and his character does shoot steroids in order to get his muscles. So what did he do to get the muscle legally?

Aronofsky: He worked really hard. Since it took a year and a half to raise the money [for the movie] and he knew about it for that long, it was ultimately about two years he had to start thinking about it. He hired this really hard core trainer, this former Israeli commando who was a former cage fighter–the guy just took no BS. He lifted twice a day and drank about 7000 calories a day and was always walking around with one of those shakes. The thing is, Mickey’s dad, his real dad, was actually a Mr. New York, a body builder. And so I think he’s always been kind of a gym rat, so he’s in that culture.

So, here I thought was at least partly an answer to my earlier question: is it possible to really build muscle after 35? The answer is (anecdotally at least) yes, if you workout twice a day, have a hard-core-cage-fighting-commando personal trainer, and have the genetics to support it. I guess for me that means, no, No, NO.

Then I went looking for pictures of his great transformation. First a picture of him in the Wrestler, released in 2008.

I then went looking for comparable shots in recently previous movies.  I couldn’t find anything for Stormbreaker (2006) or True Crime: New York City (2005), but I did find this shot for Sin City (2005)

If anything, I think he looks bigger in Sin City. Perhaps that was after a long stint of body building to get in shape. OK, that’s probably likely. Maybe then he took a year off, then started training for The Wrestler.

I think the result is that Rourke was already built for the part. Gross’ question implies he’d made a huge transformation, but in fact he was already primed to looked pumped.