Did Mickey Rourke Just Torpedo His Oscar Chances With Ugly Diss At Sean Penn?

Oof, is Mickey Rourke his own worst enemy and back to his old tricks? Could it possibly be a smear campaign?

An ugly rumor has started over at DailyBeast (via Vulture) which is sure to get some traction. According to an alleged text message that the website acquired, Rourke was trashing actor Sean Penn's performance in "Milk," calling the thespian "average" and a "homophobe."

Backstage at Letterman on December 23, Rourke was purportedly overheard as saying about Penn, “I’m not even sure he’ll get a nomination.”

An "L.A. entertainment honcho" apparently shared a text message with DailyBeast writer Gerald Posner and the msg wrote, “Look Sean's an old friend of mine and i didn't buy his performance at all—thought he did an average pretend acting like he was gay besides hes one of the most homophobic people i kno" [sic]

These are some pretty big allegations and we don't really follow the Daily Beast at all, but it is a news website published by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, so it most likely has standards well above most Internet sewer gossip sites (plenty of people are going to scoff here, but would you trust those two sources over your average blog? You should).

Rourke might be contrite in several interviews about his past, but he's not necessarily been keeping his mouth shut, having already apologized once for homophobic slurs he aimed at a reporter who alleged he had been dating his 'Wrestler' co-star Evan Rachel Wood.

There's a big Mickey fanbase out there, that's as vociferous as David Fincher fanatics, so we imagine a lot of Internet commenters are going to rush to Rourke's defense. While we have no clue what happened we read this very interesting Esquire feature about Rourke recently and it was pretty damaging. Essentially the piece is a first hand account about a writer who interviewed Rourke at his worst, how he loves him in "The Wrestler," but how he feels deep down that the troubled actor will always be a self-centered douchebag.

"Let's put this on the table right away: As far as I'm concerned, Mickey Rourke is a schmuck in the old-school sense -- a squinting organ, a thing that feels but doesn't think. A permanently wounded beast, a scar with legs. At best.

I know this because I saw the Mick at the bottom of the barrel late in 1994, spent two weeks trying to profile him while he was shooting a direct-to-video piece of crap with Tupac Shakur. That he treated me like dirt was no big deal and no surprise, but he also made a point of bad-mouthing his estranged (and now ex) wife, urging me -- unprompted and at length -- to smear her. He stank of both self-pity and braggadocio, and his effluvium of bullshit made it impossible to tell where the lies ended and the lunacy began."

And that proves what exactly? Absolutely nothing, but it's read the whole piece cause it's really interesting and it's enough to make us raise our eyebrows and worry that these allegations might be true and that the talented come back kid might have fucked himself over again by opening his big mouth.