Actor Mickey Rourke has branded fellow Hollywood star Tom Cruise as "irrelevant". He made the comment on TalkTV's Piers Morgan Uncensored programme, weeks after Cruise's Top Gun: Maverick raked in $1.2 billion.
Mr Morgan asked the 69-year-old actor how it feels to see Mr Cruise at the topping the box office charts with Top Gun: Maverick, the follow up to 1986 movie Top Gun. Mr Rourke replied, "That doesn't mean sh** to me. The guy's been doing the same effing part for 35 years. I got no respect for that."
"I don't care about money and power. I care about when I watch Al Pacino work and Chris Walken and De Niro's early work and Richard Harris' work. That's the kind of actor I want to be," Mr Rourke is heard saying in the clip of the interview posted by Piers Morgan Uncensored on its official Twitter handle.
"You don't think Tom Cruise is a good actor?" asked Mr Morgan. "I think he is irrelevant in my world," the Iron Man 2 actor replied.
"The guy's been doing the same effing part for 35 years... I got no respect for that."
— Piers Morgan Uncensored (@PiersUncensored) July 11, 2022
Mickey Rourke tells Piers Morgan he thinks Tom Cruise is "irrelevant" as an actor.@piersmorgan | @TalkTV | #MickeyRourke | #PiersMorganUncensored pic.twitter.com/joB7OSrcMD
Top Gun: Maverick revolved around the titular character as he tried to deal with his past while training a group of younger Top Gun graduates. Besides Mr Cruise, the movie starred Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Monica Barbaro, Lewis Pullman, and Ed Harris. Joseph Kosinski directed Top Gun: Maverick off a screenplay from Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie.
If its $1 billion collection, nearly $521 million (about Rs. 4,078 crore) came from the US and Canada markets, while the remaining $485 million (about Rs. 3,796 crore) came from markets elsewhere.
The Top Gun sequel became only the second movie, after the Tom Holland-starrer Spider-Man: No Way Home, to cross the $1 billion milestone since the start of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
