When Mickey Rourke accepted his Best Actor award at last year's Independent Spirit Awards for The Wrestler, he took the opportunity to remind the film community of another aging bull out there who deserves a second chance at cinematic glory. While the camera cut to a very embarrassed Roberts, Rourke declared, "Eric Roberts is probably the best actor I ever worked with, and I don't know why in the last fifteen years, ain't nobody give him a chance to show his shit again ... Eric Roberts is the fuckin' man." While the 53-year-old actor (and brother to Julia) probably won't be collecting industry hardware anytime soon, a quick trip to his IMDb page will show you he's hardly out of work. Starting September 18, you can see him as a mogul with a heart of gold in the series Crash, a spin-off of the Oscar-winning film. After that, he'll play a corrupt CIA specialist in Sly Stallone's Arnold-less action opus The Expendables. Here is the "the fuckin' man" on falling in love with a wrestler, getting embarrassed by The Wrestler, and giving makeup tips to Heath Ledger.

One of the great online mysteries is who's behind official The Expendables blog? Let's backtrack for a quick moment. The Expendables is Sylvester Stallone's action movie orgy about a group of mercenaries hired to take down a Noriega-style drug lord. The cast reads like a steroid dealer's dream: Sly Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, and Eric Roberts. The official production blog is an eerily sparse Wordpress page, mysteriously titled Ethelmae's blog. The entries are sporadic but not infrequent, and usually feature stills from set and musings on the film's supposed awesomeness. Based on a sentence like "part of my job is to make sure no one takes photos on set other than the unit photographer," the writer probably stands on the third or fourth run on the Ladder of Importance (there are 18 rungs). They are not a crucial element, but privy enough to be trusted. So when "Ethelmae" hints that Arnold Schwarzenegger will have a cameo, is he/she to be trusted? According to Eric Roberts, no.

Baby, even the losers get lucky sometimes. Mickey Rourke proved that. During his acceptance speech in Santa Monica at the Independent Spirit Awards last Saturday, he asked Hollywood to give fellow fallen 1980s actor Eric Roberts a second chance. Oh Mickey, you beautiful loser you. By just mentioning Roberts (Julia's estranged bro), you were like Bruce Springsteen reaching an outstretched hand to unknown boyish Courtney Cox and launching her career. "Eric Roberts is great actor, and you should all give him a break like you did me," he said.