Robert Downey Jr. with the Oscar for Best Actor Photo: ALLISON DINNER/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Robert Downey Jr.'s career has been one of amazing ups and downs. His transition to superheroism in the aughts remains a seismic moment for cinema: he was the fallen star from which the very first cinematic universe emerged.
But his meteoric emergence into the genre has somehow overshadowed his departure from it. Having won Best Supporting Actor for his role in Oppenheimer at the last Academy Awards, Downey finally completed one of the most incredible double comebacks in Hollywood history — Oscar, Bafta, Golden Globe» and the best reviews for almost 20 years. to show this.
“Lovers seek out the sun and get eaten. Power remains in the shadows,” croons his wily energy adviser Lewis Strauss memorably. But in his fifth decade in the business, Downey (who thanked his «horrible childhood» in his Oscar acceptance speech) has managed to chart a third path, returning to his mid-'90s decline, when his career collapsed during a very public and professional crisis . costly fight against drug abuse.
First, when Jon Favreau cast him in Iron Man in 2008, he was bringing in a movie star, albeit a very modern one. (Though he may remain the only actor who made a Marvel role work for him, rather than just frantically working on the part.) And then—well, last night—the promotion to Hollywood royalty happened. br />
His wrinkles and receding hairline could have been featured in a Christopher Nolan biopic about the nuclear age — and indeed, they were unflatteringly enlarged for the purpose. But the performance was Downey in his prime. It was the kind of meaty, morally complex character turn that seasoned actors in their 50s and 60s have craved (Downey is 58)—and it required him to flex the same acting muscles that his decade as Marvel's billionaire playboy Tony Stark had made him almost never had to use it.
When I spoke with Nolan last summer shortly before Oppenheimer's release, he was clearly seething with excitement about how Downey performance will be obtained.
“He is one of the greatest movie stars, and Jon Favreau casting him as Iron Man was one of the best casting choices in popular cinema in the last 50 years,” Nolan said. «But it's been so long since I've seen him play the truth and nuance of another person the way he did in, say, Chaplin» — the 1992 biopic in which Downey played the silent film star — «and I think his work here will shock people who don't know this side of him. And, frankly, even those who do.”
Chaplin was where Downey initially seemed unstoppable. The son of independent New York director Robert Downey Sr., he appeared in his father's projects from the age of five before finding his niche as a teenager with Hollywood's so-called Brat Pack. But breaking hearts and getting chicks to bed in films like Weird Science, Less Than Zero and Pick Up Artist is one thing. The allure of the Hollywood establishment is something else.
However, in 1993, for his role in the film “Chaplin”, he was nominated along with such heavyweights as Clint Eastwood, Denzel Washington and Al Pacino. – the third of them awarded him the Oscar for Best Actor. However, he won an equivalent Bafta — no less than Daniel Day-Lewis.
For any actor trying to parlay youthful excitement into something more lasting, this would be an enviable launching pad. However, due to growing substance abuse problems, Downey's adult career nearly came to a screeching halt.
He had the unfortunate gift of getting into drug-addicted scrapes that made for good tabloid stories: One evening, his neighbors returned home to find the actor passed out at their 11-year-old age. son's bed. Then in 1996, he was stopped for speeding, but during a search of the car, police found cocaine, heroin, crack and an unloaded revolver.
“Truth and nuance”: Robert Downey Jr. in the film “Chaplin” Photo: Alami
“It's like I have a shotgun in my mouth and I have my finger on the trigger and I like the taste of bronze,” he told a judge about his addictions in 1999 after he missed a court-ordered drug test. a line you could all too easily imagine him performing on screen. A potential stabilizing role on the legal comedy series Ally McBeal was lost after he was found by police wandering barefoot through the Culver City area of Los Angeles.
By the early 2000s he was virtually immune to insurance—and therefore unemployed—and his best roles during those difficult years came through favor and acts of faith. It was Mel Gibson, who may have seen a kindred spirit in Downey, who paid the security deposit that allowed him to star in the 2003 film The Singing Detective, and Downey's then-girlfriend (and now wife) Susan Levine, who introduced him with Lethal Weapon writer Shane. Black, who was looking for an available lead role in Kiss Bang Bang, his 2005 directorial debut.
A toast to tinsel town : Robert Downey Jr. in 1989. Photo: Getty
His biggest test came two years later in David Fincher's Zodiac, when he endured (though reportedly barely) the director's famous demands for more than 40 takes of each scene. In a recent recorded conversation with his co-star Mark Ruffalo, Downey explained that he recently reached out to Fincher after «realizing a new respect» for him while working with Nolan, saying it was the first time he felt like he The director's «legs were set on fire» with a very specific and uncompromising approach.
After that, a decade of supporting the world's biggest film franchise turned out to be useless. Although the Marvel brand would later become synonymous with interchangeable computer-generated effects, snowstorms, in its early days it was based on star power, and Downey's charisma—even the way he could look at someone over the top of his glasses—was the core of the enterprise.
Photo of Robert Downey Jr., 1999. Photo: Kypros/Getty
And while the commercial and critical problems of the bigger projects he was working on during his downtime at Marvel (The Soloist, The Judge) suggested that the MCU might be holding him back as much as he was, the extraordinary popularity of his The Sherlock Holmes films and his Oscar- and Bafta-nominated role in the provocative comedy Tropic Thunder suggest that the true picture was more complex. And while it would be an exaggeration to attribute Marvel's post-Covid decline to Downey's departure, one thing is clear: the series would not have been the same without him.
Robert Downey Jr. in the movie «Tropic Thunder» Photo: EPA
Could he then quit acting altogether? Its roughly $400 million franchise income, rising from a competitive $500,000 for the first Iron Man to a reported $75 million for Avengers: Endgame, would certainly make this an option. And his seven-acre Malibu complex, with its small menagerie, stately guest houses and central «bungalow» — a low-lying, undulating concrete structure reminiscent of a sci-fi biodome that Tony Stark himself would live in — would be a good enough place to while away the years.
Instead, surprisingly, he moved on to another blockbuster: 2020's abysmal Dolittle, which suddenly left his post-MCU career on the rocks. But if his multiplex-pleasing charisma was nowhere to be seen there, it was quietly put to good use at this year's awards show, where Downey has so far been one of the most charming flesh-attackers among the 2024 contenders.
And as Nolan noted, beyond the quality of his performance in Oppenheimer, there's the added pleasure of seeing a proven star delve into more complicated and less flattering roles. (Imagine how fun it would be to watch Tom Cruise do the same.)
As for the Oscars , then they We've long wrestled with how to authentically pay tribute to Marvel for keeping the box office ringing throughout the 2010s, and honoring the franchise's titular hero for his first (non-Dolittle) role since then might as well would do this.
Where Downessance will go remains a mystery at the moment. There is only one major project currently in production: a dark comedy miniseries set during the Vietnam War called The Sympathizer, co-produced by Downey and Park Chan-wook, in which the actor cycles through a series of U.S. military roles. . The brief nods to Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove are both incredibly enticing and, after Oppenheimer, strangely appropriate. Now that he's convinced Oscar voters to stop worrying and love the bomb, anything is possible.
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