Marisa Tomei

Interview By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

"I never felt that their relationship was really romantic. Maybe they both thought it was supposed to be romantic, but it was more of a camaraderie."

Marisa Tomei is talking about the two main characters in The Wrestler, the new film from Darren Aronofsky. There's Randy "The Ram" Robinson, played by Mickey Rourke, a washed-up pro wrestler two decades past his prime. And then there's Tomei's character, a stripper named Cassidy at least a decade past hers.

"The stories are parallel," she says. "That was Darren's idea: they're both performers, they both use their bodies for their careers -- art or entertainment, however you want to look at it, but for their livelihood, certainly. And they both have fake names."

With Rourke, it's hard to tell where the actor ends and the character begins. Like the Randy, Rourke used to be one of the top guys in his field, and like the Randy, he's spent his recent years working in smaller performances or not at all. In fact, by the time Aronofsky tried to find funding for the film, Rourke was considered such a liability that he almost had to go with another actor. Nicolas Cage was briefly attached, but then Aronofsky scaled down the budget and found overseas funding, and Rourke returned.

"I had heard some good things and some not-so-good things, but The Pope of Greenwich Village is one of my favorite movies," Marisa Tomei says about her co-star. "He's been so good in so many things. I just tried to go in without many preconceptions and just do the film. And he's a very sensitive person, and he's very charming. That's a great combination. And then he has this machismo side."

It's obvious that Rourke spent months bulking up for the role too, but Tomei had a training period of her own for her pole dancing scenes. "Mickey started like six months ahead of time, and Darren gave me, like, a month. I had a friend who teaches a lot of pole dance classes, so I had her show me some moves, and then I just went to a lot of clubs to see if there was a certain kind of style that I liked. The main thing was trying to find the right music. Darren thought she would like heavy metal hair bands, but you have to find a song that's melodious enough to strip to, but also meets the emotional requirements of the scene. That was the hardest part."

As it turned out, it was the dancing that Tomei connected with the most. "The dancing saved me. It was such a relief for it to be a physical challenge and not an emotional one. There was that high in being able to do the tricks and focus on the tricks. I focused more on the dancer persona than the tougher aspects of her life. That's what I was interested in, and I had the most fun in those scenes."

She found herself understanding, even admiring, the women who do it for a living. "These are gross generalizations, but the women that come to that come from really tortured, hard lives -- most of the statistics say that most of the women have been abused. But then there's a small percentage, whether or not they've been abused, that use it as an art -- they get transcendent through the dance. I mean, that's something we've done since the beginning of time: we dance, using our sexuality, which is our creativity. That's all part of dancing."

She pauses to take a breath. "I mean this is kind of philosophical, but it's not, it's also tangible. It's generating energy. And I just use that as a renewal. I thought about that a lot, and I think she's doing it on some level for herself. Because the people I met who were the best dancers were connected to themselves. Some were just: 'I'm going to do this because he likes this.' But the dancers who were very connected to their core, who were involved in it for themselves, seemed to be more effective overall. And I think that's what that meant to Cassidy, as well.

"And that also paralleled Mickey's story. Thematically, there's a parallel: they like what they do. There are things about what they do that they don't like, her maybe more than him, but they like what they do, and they're both getting pushed out to a degree. I think that in order to parallel him, there's got to be an empowerment and a transcendence from her. Even though we don't think about it that way. A lot of girls talked to me about how they felt empowered when they danced."

Her co-star is now being talked up for a Best Actor Oscar nomination, but after getting a nod from the Golden Globes, Tomei has a real shot as well -- which would be a nice vindication for a shoot that she herself admits was tough.

"It was just very long hours, and Darren likes a lot of takes," she says. "He's very generous, he has an incredible vision, he's totally there for you -- but he also, I think, likes to push you past [the limit.] He likes to explore all aspects of a scene, so you'll do it like twenty, thirty, forty times -- and that's just one angle. It can make you cuckoo."

Plus, there was the other thing: "It was cold. I was naked, and everybody else had coats on." ❏