Mickey Rourke, MCU alumni seen in Iron Man 2, has compared the “real acting” in Law & Order: SVU to the “crap” acting in all of that “Marvel shit” as if there’s any correlation in an unexpected rant on Instagram.
You might recognise Mickey Rourke from his appearance in Iron Man 2, but don’t expect him to appear in any more Marvel projects in the future – it appears that he is not a fan. In a bizarre Instagram rant praising Law & Order: SVU, a television franchise that has absolutely no connection to the MCU, he found a way to sneak in a dig at the poor acting in Marvel movies.
Rourke portrayed Ivan Vanko (aka Whiplash), in the 2010 Iron Man sequel, and now over a decade later he’s still taking hits at the franchise after the experience apparently didn’t go so well for him. At the end of his lengthy Instagram caption applauding the acting in Law & Order, he went out of his way to claim that the work SVU does “is real acting, not like that crap that all on Marvel shit”.
This isn’t his first unprovoked public slamming of Marvel – in 2014, after being asked if he was a comic book fan on Light Night With Seth Meyers, he made his stance clear:
“I’m not a Marvel fan… Once I did a movie for Marvel and they cut the whole fucking thing out… When you bring it to the table, it’s really disappointing when they cut things out.”
The complaint that his character was edited to become a very one-dimensional, standard villain rather than the potentially complex antagonist Rourke was trying to build is valid, but his blatant disdain for Marvel makes you wonder if there’s any more to the story.
View this post on Instagram
Justified or not, Mickey Rourke’s public call-outs of Marvel as an entirety are nothing if not random. Out of all the scenarios in which I would expect Marvel films to be (often fairly) critiqued, an Instagram post dedicated to Law & Order is not one of them.
Rourke shared a collage of the show’s main actors to his Instagram following of 199k, seeming to think he was doing a service by sharing his discovery. It appears that, despite the show being on the air since 1999, the actor and former boxer simply had no clue that it existed until lockdown begun.
Mickey Rourke is all of us https://t.co/XvzgQHYOb3
— Sarah Devin (Marsha Haggarty stan) (@sarahdevin) May 9, 2021
Rourke reckons he’s seen about 1,000 episodes of the show since he accidentally turned it on while working out in his living room during isolation (despite less than 500 episodes existing) and is astounded that in every episode “the producing is terrific, the directing is top class” and he’s “really impressed with this ensemble of highly talented actors”.
He goes on to individually praise the talents of several key actors, tagging them in the caption as well as the image, so I hope they appreciate all the free promo. Not that they need it, with the show still airing after two decades and all that.
Mickey Rourke is literally in marvel 😭😭😭
— Patrick (@VapidTroll) May 9, 2021
Mickey Rourke seems positively thrilled with his ‘discovery’ of a show that quite possibly everyone else on this earth is already aware of, but I’ll let him have his moment. Maybe not the right occasion to be dragging Marvel out of nowhere though.
