While he was there, Rourke said he met with Putin.
"He took us to a very famous museum in St. Petersburg. And then later he took me to a children's cancer hospital. And we went in there and visited the really, really sick, little, tiny, tiny kids," Rourke recalled.
"I looked over at him and I saw him and, nobody's going to want to hear this, but I saw a man with empathy and who was really moved by what these children are going through," Rourke, who once wore a shirt with Putin's face on it in 2014 and reportedly spoke kindly of him at the time, said.