Mickey Rourke Says He "Went to the Wrong Guy" to Put His Face Back Together

Thanks in part to his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother U.K., many people are looking back at the life of Mickey Rourke and wondering how he got to where he is today. He became a major movie star over the course of the 1980s but left acting behind in the early 1990s to become a professional boxer.

Although he has occasionally returned to acting in the years since, many have noted that his face is not quite as dashing as it once was, and it doesn't seem like age alone is the reason for the changes. Here's what we know about what happened to Mickey Rourke's face.

According to him, Mickey has his boxing career to blame for the state of his face. He's undergone tons of plastic surgery in the years since the peak of his fame in the 1980s and once told The Daily Mail that he hadn't always gone to the best in the business to have his work done. "Most of it was to mend the mess of my face because of the boxing, but I went to the wrong guy to put my face back together," he explained in 2009.

"I had my nose broken twice. I had five operations on my nose and one on a smashed cheekbone," he added. "I had to have cartilage taken from my ear to rebuild my nose and a couple of operations to scrape out the cartilage because the scar tissue wasn't healing properly. That was one of the most painful operations, but the worst was hemorrhoids."

Although his boxing career only lasted a couple of years, it seems like Mickey had to have a lot of work done to repair the damage that was done to his face.

Even in the years since he left boxing, though, Mickey has continued to have work done, posting about a nose job in 2017.

His ex-wife also said that he would sometimes get work done for particular roles, even if the consequences were permanent.

"He’ll kill me for saying this, but he wanted the part in one film so badly that he got cheek implants. He told me he was swollen because he’d had his molar teeth removed. But I knew that was untrue — he didn’t have any molars to take out," Debra Fuer told The Mirror.

If you're looking for a short answer to what happened to Mickey Rourke's face, then the answer is that he got beat up a bunch and then had a lot of plastic surgery. And, by his own admission, he has not always loved the results of the surgeries that he has undergone.

In spite of that, though, he was still able to return to acting and deliver an acclaimed performance in the 2008 film The Wrestler. He also got to be a villain in an Iron Man movie, albeit the one that most people hate.