Speak­ing with The Guardian, Rourke men­tions how he learned a lit­tle Russ­ian for his role:

And Iron Man 2, in which he plays Tony Stark’s tat­tooed Russ­ian neme­sis, Ivan, is pos­si­bly the biggest movie yet in Rourke’s new career. For Rourke this means going to Rus­sia, drink­ing vodka and vis­it­ing jails to study prison tat­toos and find his character’s tics. “I decided to do half my role in Russ­ian,” he beams, “and that’s hard because the Russ­ian lan­guage doesn’t roll off the English-speaking tongue very eas­ily. I spent three hours a day with a teacher, and after two weeks I know four sen­tences! Let me see, it’s sort of like… ‘Yez­za­mee menya… Yez­za­mee manya obott… Er, nema­boootty menya…’”

This goes on for quite some time. “It means,” he says, finally, “If some­one kills me, don’t wake me up, because I’d rather be dead than live in your world.”

But the land of block­buster movies is not some­where Rourke plans to stay long. “I’m not gonna rush out and see the next Bat­man, I’m not big on for­mula movies. I don’t like all that Spider-Man shit.”