Robert Downey Jr. has established himself as one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Though he was already a fixture in the industry before the release of his star-making role as Tony Stark in Iron Man, he was arguably more famous for his widely publicized legal and substance abuse issues than for his box-office appeal. Thanks to his role as Tony Stark, few people in the world haven’t heard of him.
The actor has had one of the most fascinating and eventful careers in Hollywood, so it’s worth taking a look at some of the more fascinating anecdotes that have emerged about his various roles, whether during his time in the Brat Pack or his more recent appearances, from Natural Born Killers to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Tropic Thunder, Less than Zero, Sherlock Holmes, and Oppenheimer.
In some important ways, Iron Man is the heart and soul of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. From the moment he appeared in Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. endowed Tony Stark with his signature charisma, charm, and sarcasm. This stayed true from the very beginning until Iron Man gave his life to ensure Thanos didn’t inflict his vision on the rest of the universe.
His death scene is wrenching because the viewer has come to know Stark so well over the preceding films in the saga. The scene is remarkable because Stark has relatively few lines in the sequence, making each one count. According to Stephen McFeely, who co-wrote the screenplay, this was largely Downey Jr.’s idea.
The actor, McFeely said, knew “instinctively” that “a guy who has talked and talked and talked for many, many movies, when he doesn't talk, you are crushed… He knew that, and we didn't feel we could turn in a page where he didn't talk. So he says, 'Listen, I want to do much, much less,' and he was right."
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Before Robert Downey Jr. became a superstar thanks to appearing as Iron Man, he was known for his struggles with the law and dependency. Some of these struggles even made their way into the material of the first Iron Man film, particularly the moment when Stark returns to the US after coming back from Afghanistan and requests a burger, which comes from Burger King.
This was more than just a bit of branding. As Downey Jr. recounted around the time of the film’s release, the burger franchise meant a great deal personally to him. At on point he was driving around with a significant amount of controlled substances in his car when he pulled into a Burger King. "I have to thank Burger King," he said. "It was such a disgusting burger I ordered. I had that, and this big soda, and I thought something really bad was going to happen." He then had something of an epiphany, and from then on made a commitment to getting clean and sober.
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Director Shane Black's 2005 film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a clever mix of hardboiled fiction and black comedy in which Robert Downey Jr. stars as Harry Lockhart, one of the main characters who also happens to be the narrator. The character exhibits many traits that would become associated with the actor’s persona as Tony Stark: Lockhart is sardonic, cynical, and very, very funny.
Though the film wasn’t nearly as successful as Downey Jr. had hoped it would be, it did have one unexpected but significant benefit. The film brought him to the attention of director Jon Favreau, who would cast the actor a few years later in what would come to be his defining role. Downey said in an interview: “It ended up being my calling card to Iron Man.”
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He Improvised The Final Line Of ‘Iron Man’
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Robert Downey Jr. delivered such a powerful and electric performance as Tony Stark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the role, and he helped elevate the superhero film into the realm of popular art.
One of the most remarkable moments in the original Iron Man film is the final line, when Tony Stark proclaims, in no uncertain terms, “I am Iron Man.” This statement wasn’t in the original script - Downey Jr. improvised the line. As Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige recalled:
It’s a fine line. If you’re changing something for no reason, that’s one thing, but if you’re changing something because you want to double down on the spirit of who the character is? That’s a change we’ll make. Tony Stark not reading off the card and not sticking with the fixed story? Him just blurting out, “I am Iron Man”? That seems very much in keeping with who that character is.
The moments was key to creating Tony Stark’s personality, and came to define him for the rest of the saga.
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In Ben Stiller's 2008 film Tropic Thunder, released the same year as Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. plays a controversial role: Kirk Lazarus, an actor so committed to method acting that he has his skin altered to play an African American man. Even in a film that is so straightforwardly satirical, this choice raised eyebrows because it seemed to play into the troubling history of blackface in American entertainment.
One of those who expressed dismay was the actor’s mother, Elsie Ann Downey. Downey Jr. told The Washington Post:
My mother was horrified. [She said]: “Bobby, I’m telling you, I have a bad feeling about this.” I was like "Yeah, me too, mom."
Despite their reservations, the role would go on to become one of the most popular of Downey Jr.'s career.
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Given the success of Iron Man, it wasn’t long before the rest of the MCU became a true juggernaut. Though Tony Stark doesn't appear in every MCU film, he's still a vital part of the franchise, and when it became clear that Robert Downey Jr. was a truly bankable star, his salary increased dramatically. The same wasn’t true for many of his co-stars, even among those who were his fellow Avengers.
The studio was apparently not generous in its salary offerings to stars such as Chris Hemsworth, who considered walking away from the MCU altogether. Downey Jr., however, played a bit of hardball with Marvel in the lead-up to Age of Ultron, and his tactics - which purportedly included threatening to walk away from his role as Iron Man - bore fruit. Though none of his co-stars earned as much as he did for the film, they did receive significant raises. The film itself went on to become a blockbuster, one of the many MCU films to earn more than $1 billion at the box office.
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He Drew On His Grandfather For His Characterization Of Lewis Strauss In 'Oppenheimer'
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In Christopher Nolan’s 2023 biopic Oppenheimer, Robert Downey Jr. plays the primary antagonist Lewis Strauss, a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The actor delivers his trademark authenticity, frequently clashing with Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer.
There’s a very good reason for the richness of Downey Jr.’s performance. As he recounted in an interview with The New York Times:
In doing a bunch of research on Strauss, I connected it to my own grandfather, who would have been a contemporary of his. Robert Elias, whom I never met, was in the U.S. Army, self-made guy. There’s a cool simile between something he was involved in and how Strauss probably felt about Oppenheimer. This grandfather helped do the glass for the Chrysler Building, and the Chrysler and the Empire State were vying to be the biggest. So I was thinking, how can I make Strauss’s competitiveness with Oppenheimer personal, and it was: Look at that building over there that’s no better than mine getting all the shine! I don’t think there’s another human being alive that can’t admit to having fallen into the vagaries of comparison.
Interesting story? Shortly after he vaulted to superstardom in Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. headlined another franchise, this time as the title character in Guy Ritchie’s 2009 film Sherlock Holmes. The success of the film led to fast-tracked production for a sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.
The timeline had significant consequences for Downey Jr., who dropped out of another project due to scheduling conflicts with the Sherlock Holmes sequel. As it turned out, this was a good move on his part, as the film he was almost in, Cowboys & Aliens, which was mostly a dud with critics and audiences, despite direction by Jon Favreau (who had helmed Iron Man) and a powerful cast including Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford.
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The 1994 film Natural Born Killers, directed by Oliver Stone, focuses on a pair of mass murderers and the way the media contributes to their superstardom. Robert Downey Jr. plays an important role as Wayne Gale, a tabloid journalist who is key to the pair’s burgeoning stardom.
If there’s one thing that has long characterized Downey Jr.’s method as an actor, it is improvisation, which was true on the set of Natural Born Killers. The actor's co-star Juliette Lewis recalled:
I remember being in the rehearsals, all of these things just came on the fly, like his Australian accent. He was like, "I'm thinking about doing a little bit Robin Leach, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous - what do you think, Oliver?" All Oliver wanted was your contribution and that you lit up creatively. It was like there was no creative impulse he wouldn't take. It was really fun. But Downey is just an improv wizard. He's electric and he was just phenomenal as this bizarre Wayne Gale character. There's so much humor in the film.
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Given the enormous influence both directors and stars have over film production, it’s inevitable for clashes - sometimes extreme - to emerge between larger-than-life personalities on a set. This was the case with David Fincher’s Zodiac, which focuses on efforts to discover the identity of the infamous Zodiac Killer.
Fincher and Robert Downey Jr. did not get along on the set, mainly due to a clash of styles, with the director’s meticulousness coming into conflict with Downey Jr.’s well-known spontaneity. The actor told The New York Times:
Sometimes it’s really hard because it might not feel collaborative, but ultimately filmmaking is a director’s medium. I just decided, aside from several times I wanted to garrote him, that I was going to give him what he wanted. I think I’m a perfect person to work for him, because I understand gulags.
Downey Jr. got so outraged at Fincher’s dictatorial style - which made it almost impossible for members of the cast take enough bathroom breaks - that he took to leaving jars full of urine all over the set.
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Like many of the films of the 1980s, Less Than Zero is concerned with the youth culture of the decade, particularly among those who were both wealthy and self-indulgent. In this adaptation of the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, Downey Jr. plays Julian, whose addiction to cocaine becomes a key plot element.
Downey Jr. has been open about the extent to which the film made his real-life dependency problems even worse:
Until that movie, I took my drugs after work and on the weekends. Maybe I’d turn up hungover on the set, but no more so than the stuntman. That changed on Less Than Zero. I was playing this junkie-f*ggot guy and, for me, the role was like the Ghost of Christmas Future. The character was an exaggeration of myself. Then things changed and, in some ways, I became an exaggeration of the character. That lasted far longer than it needed to last.
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In the 2020 film Dolittle, Robert Downey Jr. plays the title character, a man who can talk to animals. Although the film featured some dazzling special effects and Downey Jr.’s particular brand of charm, critics were not impressed.
The actor still sees Doolittle as an important part of his career, however, as he told Entertainment Weekly in 2023:
Honestly, the two most important films I've done in the last 25 years are The Shaggy Dog, because that was the film that got Disney saying they would insure me. Then the second most important film was Dolittle, because Dolittle was a two-and-a-half-year wound of squandered opportunity… After that point - what's that phrase? Never let a good crisis go to waste. We had this reset of priorities and made some changes in who our closest business advisers were.
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While he might be best known now as a superhero, Robert Downey Jr. is no stranger to playing villains. In the 1998 film U.S. Marshals, he plays John Royce, a nefarious mole within the organization who is determined to terminate anyone who gets in his way.
It’s a memorable performance from the actor, but Downey Jr. was less than complimentary about his filming experience, saying he'd “rather wake up in jail for a TB test than have to wake up another morning knowing I'm going to the set of U.S. Marshals.” He said in another interview:
I don't remember anything about U.S. Marshals except that we were running around and pretending like we could ever hold a candle to The Fugitive. [Laughs.] I just remember like, “Strap on your bulletproof vest, you're in the bayou!”
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In the suspenseful thriller Gothika, Robert Downey Jr. plays Dr. Pete Graham, co-starring with Halle Berry, who portrays a psychiatrist falsely accused of a crime. The film was a financial risk for Downey Jr. because of his real-life problematic history, producer Joel Silver recalled:
It was hard for Robert because he had insurance issues. He had to pretty much put up his entire salary on Gothika as an insurance premium. The studio really wouldn’t do it unless we agreed to pay an enormous amount of money - and we didn’t have that money. But he got through it. At the conclusion of the picture he got his salary back and everybody was fine and when we did this picture there was no issue.
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