The Beverly Grove house where Mickey Rourke lived until his eviction. (Hayes Davenport / L.A. Material)
LAST WEDNESDAY, four days before the Oscars, former Best Actor nominee Mickey Rourke was evicted from his home in Beverly Grove after an extended dispute with his landlord over unpaid rent.
The house, a short walk from the Academy Museum, is a red-orange Spanish 3BR/2BA that turns 100 this year. Rourke had been renting it for more than a decade: first for $5,200 a month when he signed the lease in March of 2015, and then up to $7,000 by the time of his eviction.
The rent owed according to the landlord, a lawyer in Encino named Eric T. Goldie who bought the house in 2022, was $59,100. Rourke was served a three-day notice to “pay or quit” in January.
Rourke’s manager, Kimberly Hines, helped set up a GoFundMe to raise the cash. It had brought in about $100,000 when Rourke posted a video to Instagram saying that he hadn’t been aware of the donation effort and wouldn’t accept any of the money. “I'd rather stick a gun up my ass and pull the trigger," he said — holding his dog Lucky, other dogs barking nearby.
It wasn’t the first time Rourke had found himself in a financial dispute with a property owner.
One of those property owners was the current President of the United States, who removed Rourke from his Plaza Hotel in 1994 after Rourke reportedly caused $20,000 worth of damage to a suite. “His behavior was completely irresponsible, and it cannot and will not be tolerated,” Trump said after the incident. In 2017, Rourke’s landlord in Tribeca accused him of falling $30,000 behind on rent, while also causing $10,000 worth of damage.
Rourke offered no public comment on those incidents at the time, but he put out a statement after last week’s eviction, saying that he’d stopped paying rent because “the living conditions in the house had become unacceptable.” His manager, Hines, told The Hollywood Reporter that when her staff went to Rourke’s house to move him out, “There was black mold. No running water. So basically, we can’t even move any of the furniture out. There was water damage.”
If anyone could pull off an unlikely triumph in eviction court, it might be Rourke, who is known for improbable comebacks. After a brief foray into professional boxing in the early 90s amid a prolonged drought in his acting career, he became an A-lister again in the mid-2000s, earning acclaim for his performances in movies like Sin City and The Wrestler — for which Rourke won a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama, beating Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Sean Penn.
Ripped posters for both movies were visible among piles of garbage in front of the house this week.
Posted on the door with blue electrical tape was an eviction notice — standard procedure when residents are unable to be found and served in person.
An eviction notice taped to the door of Mickey Rourke’s former residence. (Hayes Davenport / L.A. Material)
On the grass just outside the door was a damp 2015 letter from an animal hospital. Rourke’s dog, an American Eskimo named Ruby, had been referred for masses on her left shoulder, which the letter reported “appear to be benign fatty tumors.”
Ruby, who Rourke thanked by name in his Golden Globe acceptance speech, lived until 2022. “She had the greatest personality of any dog I ever had,” Rourke said in an Instagram post announcing her death. “I been thinking about her so much at night.”
Reached by email, Rourke’s manager Hines referred questions about the eviction to one of her colleagues, who did not respond to a request for comment.
