His resurrection has all the characteristics of an origin story for a Hollywood superhero: A gifted young actor loses his way, cheats death again and again, then straightens himself out just in time to conquer the world. But the way Robert Downey Jr. tells it, the reality involves a lot more detours, and the final act still hasn't been written. With Iron Man 3 poised to extend his outrageous hot streak, Downey invited GQ's Chris Heath to his house in Malibu to talk about where he's been, where he's going, and where all the demons went.
Robert Downey Jr. habitually carries with him a miniature brown leather suitcase. If he's rummaging inside it, it's usually for another square of Nicorette gum, but there's all sorts of stuff in there: rattling pill bottles—antiparasitics and antivirals ("Sushi's worth it, but sometimes you've got to clean the bugs out") and some kind of chemical if he happens to eat bread—a dark blue beanie bearing the logo of the security company that guards this Malibu estate, some medallions whose twins I'll later see his wife, Susan, wearing, and a typed letter he recently received from Woody Harrelson onto the back of which he has, perhaps absentmindedly, been pressing chewed globs of gum. There is also—and this is what he removes now from the case to show me—a solid-gold Iron Man helmet head.
Downey holds in his hands the head of the character who set his life on a new trajectory and examines it.
"It is funny, dude," he says. "I do contemplate this thing."
Downey commissioned a jeweler to make a set of these heads as gifts for crew members when Iron Man 3 wrapped, but he kept one for himself and it is now his to ponder at his leisure. "There's some sort of strange message about something in there," he says. "Just about masks, and what people create. I still haven't figured it out. There's no rush."
Downey remembers staring at an image of that stoic gleaming helmet, as he tried to work out what it would take to be the man inside it, when he was preparing for his Iron Man audition in 2006. It is easy to forget what a strange place Robert Downey's career was in back then, and not just because of the long trail of upheavals—the drugs, the guns, the arrests, the rehabs, the prison sentences—that could have destroyed it.
For years, whenever Downey appeared on TV, he was routinely introduced as "one of the greatest actors of his generation." (Downey's demeanor on such occasions suggested that such statements expressed a truth so obvious it barely needed repeating.) What was less apparent, until you looked with a cold empirical stare at the whole sweep of his career, was that he was also one of the least successful actors of his generation, almost unbelievably so. The biggest hit he had ever been in was the long-forgotten 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School, which came out when he was 21. After that, no matter what fanfare each new movie arrived with, and no matter how often Downey's own contribution would be highlighted, it was disappointment after disappointment. His two best and most notable performances in those years were in Less Than Zero and Chaplin, but both were commercial flops. When he chose movies so commercial that their success seemed predestined—Air America in 1990 with perhaps the biggest star of that era, Mel Gibson; The Fugitive sequel, U.S. Marshals, in 1998—the rebuke of their failure seemed almost humiliating.
Downey suggests now that he began to see this pattern as a statistical aberration. "The odds were against it," he argues. "Most people, they've been around twenty years or more, just even by accident they were in something that made a ton of dough." But that was the one accident he seemed incapable of getting himself into. At times, he'd wonder if it was worth it. "Some part of me," he says, "and this is maybe some injured part of me, has been looking to say 'I quit! I retire!' since whenever."
Still, in the middle of the past decade things started looking up. He married the film producer Susan Levin, finally seemed to be putting some sustainable distance between himself and his addiction problems, started doing what he considered "solid work with people I liked to work with," and discovered that he was, as he puts it, "incredibly happy." Yet a certain kind of success (the kind, let's be blunt, commonly known just as "success") continued to elude him. In 2005 it happened once again, this time with the comedic noir Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. This was a particularly tough blow—it was well reviewed, Downey was proud of his part in it, and his wife had produced it. "And then," he remembers, "watching it come out and make eighty-five bucks..."
I ask him what he was thinking at that point.
"In two words: 'Where's mine?' "
He might've been justified in concluding that this was how it would be from now on—that the moment for Downey to be a star had passed, and he should expect the same future as many other talented middle-aged actors: occasional good parts in small movies, occasional small parts in big movies, maybe an extended run in one of the new breed of smart TV dramas. But Downey remained stubbornly confident that his was still out there somewhere. "I felt like a fighter who was training for a title bout that had not been booked yet," he says.
Then he heard about Iron Man. Knowing what we know now, Downey's fixation on the role makes the best possible sense. But nothing was so obvious at the time. Starring as a Marvel comic-book hero on the big screen might sound like a sure route to a big audience and guaranteed success, but plenty of actors had already learned otherwise. (Ask Eric Bana. Or Edward Norton. Or Ben Affleck. Or Jennifer Garner.) And Iron Man wasn't even considered in the first tier of Marvel heroes.
But Downey was obsessed with the notion that the part should be his. "I don't know why," he says. "I do like a bit of Jung, and it was just this kind of numinous thing." Even after the film's director, Jon Favreau, passed on the word from Marvel that it wasn't going to happen, Downey refused to listen. (Favreau later explained that Marvel had actually been even more definite: "Under no circumstances are we prepared to hire him for any price.") Downey persisted nonetheless, and eventually he was told he'd at least get a screen test.
He had three weeks to ready himself. The way Downey describes what happened in that period seems itself like an origin montage from a superhero story: a time of focused preparation and of "spiritual/ ritualistic processes" that he still considers private and prefers not to detail. He worked on the scenes over and over: "The missus says she could've woken me up in the middle of the night and I'd have recited the audition dialogue in double time."
"It was all shock, awe, conquer—it was about devastating the competition," he says. When he walked into the room at Raleigh Studios, he was ready. "Right before the first take I felt like I almost left my body—a sudden surge of nerves," he says, and remembers wondering whether they had noticed. "Then, all of a sudden, it was like coasting downhill on an old Schwinn Cruiser, like I could do no wrong."
Since then, very little in Downey's career has gone wrong. It's hard to think of another reversal of movie fortune quite so dramatic, certainly for a fortysomething actor: a huge Iron Man sequel (and one assumes the third will be similarly massive), acclaim and commercial success for Tropic Thunder, the similarly thriving Sherlock Holmes franchise, the astonishing record-breaking feats of The Avengers, all of them not just featuring Downey but powered by him at their center. Everything that failed to work for him for so long now seemed to work effortlessly, and these were not all obvious triumphs. Think about Sherlock Holmes: Were there really many good reasons to believe that a movie set in Victorian England with Guy Ritchie directing would result in anything but a messy, ill-disciplined misfire? And yet every single movie on that list has been far more successful than any he had previously been involved with. It is, he concedes, "the sweet spot that kind of continued."
I ask whether he has been doing something better to make all this happen. He thinks for a while, and when he answers he does so seriously.
"We work weekends," he says. "This is not a 'Monday through Friday and then let's go and party in Aspen' thing. We work weekends."
···
Conversations with Robert Downey Jr. are rarely linear, and sometimes it takes a moment to realize how one thing might relate to the next. But I realize after a while that if you keep up with him, hang on tight, and have faith, all kinds of strange sense may eventually be made. "That's the great thing—it's such a floating freak show," he tells me at one point about the movie world. "You get a bit older and you start to see what's going on backstage in the collective psyche of this ridiculous industry."
What do you notice?
"Everybody is kind of the same. I'm sorry! We're all just kind of the same."
What do you mean?
"Nothing pleases me more than when somebody who was awe-inspired to be working with me realizes I'm just another schmuck that they're bored of hanging out with on a set. I love that moment. I like it when that persistent illusion is smashed."
But how does that fit in with something you've often said—that you have to believe you're the most talented person on any set?
"Well, I try to instill that in other people, but it only gets you so far. That to me is just the precursor for even getting up, because nobody wants to see somebody struggling with their own confidence—it's boring and it takes a long time and you're probably not going to get there."
But I still believe that you think you're almost always the most talented person there.
"Yeah, but you know what? I'm afraid that's just a tape that's running in my head, and I'm really happy that it's there, but it doesn't make it real."
And so if you stop that tape running for a second, how talented are you?
He smiles. "I'm probably one of the best."
That was you speaking, and not the tape?
"Yeah. But it's not that big a deal. It's not like this is the greatest swath or generation of actors that has ever come down the pike."
What are you bad at as an actor?
"Tons. Everything I avoid. I don't like opening doors and looking surprised. I can do all that emo stuff, but I'm so over everyone who has to have a meltdown— everybody is emotional all the time. In movies people seem to be more emotional than they would ever be if that situation was actually happening to them."
No shit.
"Yeah. And the funny thing is: People eat that up. It's not that I'm better than that or I've transcended that, it's that...I don't know...once you've been in Amsterdam and you've been in some weird magazine shop and you see some title like Hond Seks"—literally translated as "dog sex," by which he means "sex with dogs"—"you just don't want to go to that part of town anymore."
Hold on, you've just compared acting a bit overemotionally to—
"—To bestiality! Yeah. I'm sorry, but they're both these kind of grotesque things. I don't want to say they're grotesque, but I have a reaction to it. I know you go there and you do it and it works and people eat it up, but..."
You're talking about bestiality, I presume.
"Now, I'm not saying there isn't a genuine connection between these people and their animals. And that they're not sad when they go, the next morning...."
We talk in various places on the Downeys' Malibu estate. We begin at a table outside, where the lawns begin to slope downhill toward the glistening Pacific, while Downey's chef serves us lunch: shepherd's pie. Downey is just starting a three-week cleanse, so he tells me that this will be his only proper meal of the day. On the patio nearby is a metal robot. He has an ax in one hand and a potato peeler in the other. "Which I think is pretty awesome," says Downey. "He might kill you, or we might make some string fries together."
After lunch we lounge for an hour or two in his wife's office. His assistant brings us green tea, which Downey is using during the cleanse to stave off the no-coffee headaches. At one point, talking about the future, Downey begins a sentence, "If I want to grow as an artist I have to be willing..." and then pulls himself to a halt. " 'Artist!' " he repeats in self-mockery, and starts again using different words. Afterward, I ask him why he recanted "artist."
"Because it's not that serious and it's not that artistic," he says. He points to a painting on the wall next to his wife's desk. "That's art—that's a Miró." He finds a further way of dramatizing the difference. "There was no poster telling you that he was going to be coming out with that."
There's a lot of this kind of art in the house. Among the many pieces in just this room, there's a Giacometti drawing behind me and a Banksy in the middle of the wall to my left. And the Miró. "Honey likes Mirós," he says. "She's crazy about them. We've got a bunch of them. We don't have a collection, per se. There's smatterings." (There is a slight marital divergence on this issue, of the kind you can indulge when you've had a chain of recent hits like Downey's: "I like Picasso—she likes Miró.") Also on the wall here, just by the Miró, is a photographic triptych of the Downeys' 1-year-old son documenting the first time Exton ate spinach, with fairly calamitous results.
A while later Susan brings in Exton for a visit. She hands him to Downey. "I think he peed through," she says, "but if you don't mind."
"How did my diaper hold up?" he asks.
"Great," she says.
"Good," he says. "Felt like I nailed it." He talks to his son. "Can you take a couple of steps? Show off?" His son delivers. "Good boy." Downey points out that Exton's bloodline is, thanks to his wife's influence, far more normal than his.
"We have eccentric people on my side of the family," Susan protests. "We just don't have any..." She pauses there.
"...Aberrant behaviors?" suggests Downey. "Yes," she says.
"Thank you," says Downey.
"Those were the words I was dodging," she says. As they leave, he kisses his wife, then his son, and then his son one more time on the flesh of his back. I ask him whether it seems surreal to him—his life now compared with fifteen years ago. Or is surreal the wrong word?
"No, it's not the wrong word," he says, and mentions that when he was out walking Exton in his stroller around the neighborhood this morning, he was remembering how he used to do the same when his first son was young. "Life," he says, "is just so painful and messy and hard and worth it and all that stuff."
···
Before the recent upturn in his career, Downey says that he was not a wealthy man. "The missus has always been able to pull in some ducats here and there," he says. "I was definitely leaning on her for a while. And happily so, I might add. I would make a great deadbeat husband—I would have no problem with that whatsoever."
You didn't have a few million dollars stashed somewhere?
"No."
Did that irk you?
"Very much so. I had gotten into all this tax trouble, which I highly recommend to anyone who thinks that any of their life problems are annoying—get some tax trouble, and that will take your mind off everything else."
Had you messed up?
"Probably. I didn't do any of it willfully. You have a little bit of dough and you can manage everything. You have a little bit more dough, and you reach out toward the boundaries of where you think you can now go, and the wind blows the wrong way and you're fucked for five years."
Fortunately, few things un-fuck you better, in this respect, than starring in a string of huge-grossing movies. And any lingering financial pressures have been further eased by the success of The Avengers. Downey has taken pride in being deeply involved in every stage of the solo Iron Man movies, but for The Avengers he fitted into Joss Whedon's wider vision. "I really just showed up, hit my marks," he says. "Joss would write some lines or I would come up with a line. It was very easy—it was so easy I didn't see how it could work." Whatever contract Downey signed when he agreed to appear in multiple movies as Iron Man allowed him a share of The Avengers' payday far bigger than anyone could have anticipated. The Hollywood Reporter recently suggested that the true figure was around $50 million. It's not the kind of thing most actors are prepared to talk about, but I ask Downey anyway.
"Yeah," he says, smiling.
Is that number about right?
"Yeah." A broader smile.
That's amazing.
"Isn't that crazy?" he says. "They're so pissed. I can't believe it. I'm what's known as 'a strategic cost.' "
Is it easy for you to believe that you're the same person who spent all that time in prison?
"Yeah."
It just makes perfect sense to you?
"Nothing makes perfect sense. I've explored it so much, and right now I just look back at it as: It was certainly character-building."
But that seems almost deliberately glib.
"It's not like I went to war, and if you talk to some people who come back from doing a tour, they're pretty glib. I think what they're indicating by that is 'I'm processing it at my own speed...and let me let you know that the fact that I'm here gives me reason to be glib. Because back there is not like here.' "
I ask Downey what was the key thing that finally enabled him to move away from where he was and how he used to be. He suggests that any answer he gives today might be different from an answer yesterday or tomorrow. "What would I say?" he considers. "I fell in love?" He offers this in a way that seems to say: That's certainly true, but if you imagine that any one answer can fill the gap that follows a question like that, then you don't really have a clue what it is that you're asking about.
"Any of my answers," he adds, "always have to do with: I stopped worrying about fixing things and just dealt with what was right in front of me. The bouncing ball of the moment."
···
Downey knows that no ball can bounce forever like his has in recent years. "This period of time, this shall pass," he says. "Fortunately I've been around the block enough—I'm not ill-prepared. And I love change. I love it when a lightning bolt hits the genny and you're down for two hours on the set. Now, this isn't a lightning strike, this is like the warning of a gathering storm."
When I ask him what the gathering storm is in this case, he answers by telling me about the injury he sustained on the Iron Man 3 set in North Carolina that shut down production for several weeks. He was doing the kind of wire jump he's done hundreds of times over the past few years, and he blew his ankle out.
"It got me thinking about how big the message from your cosmic sponsor needs to be before you pick it up. How many genre movies can I do? How many follow-ups to a successful follow-up are actually fun? Because, as quiet as it's kept, I come from a family of very innovative writers and directors and actors and artists, and the circle of friends they were in were the people I heard having pun-offs playing poker at two in the morning, and it was just the most comforting aspect of my childhood. So there's this kind of legacy of souls from what I consider to be a very particular time in entertainment, and I'm sensing a return to that—it's what me and the missus are doing next. It's not unlike: I heard Brady signed on for three more years with New England, and then he's done being a QB, because he'll be 40. I'm 47, and I'll be 50."
So that's the line in your head at the moment?
"Yeah, roughly."
So what stops at 50? Superheroes?
"I don't know. I don't know. Right now I don't have a contract to do anything, and I did for the last five years."
Would you really walk away if they offer you a respectful deal for Iron Man 4, Iron Man 5?
"Here's the thing. At whatever point I'm done with this, I'm going to have a bit of a crisis, because I probably haven't even fully ingested how much I've enjoyed it, how much it's meant. It so came out of kind of relative obscurity as this second-tier character from the Marvel universe, and I feel I was part of making it something more. But it also to me was just good filmmaking. It's funny, people will come up to me and go, 'Dude, how do you do it? How do you dress up and play these...?' While whatsisname is shooting the next David O. Russell or whatever, I'm, 'Here's the thing, you're either having a good time or a bad time, and you're either doing a good movie or a bad movie.' And I know one thing, which is that there is no guarantee that doing a movie you think is 'important' "—Downey enunciates the word important in a wonderfully withering way—"isn't going to be the worst piece of tripe I've ever had to sit through. Or that this kind of two-dimensional genre movie I'm doing isn't actually going to be thoroughly entertaining. Isn't that why you went to the movies to begin with? Whatever."
In the meantime, Downey is fully involved in making sure that Iron Man 3 becomes all that he believes it should be. In recent days, he has been a regular visitor to the editing suite, not a place where the lead actor in a film is usually either found or welcome. I ask Downey what his input is when he goes. What is he trying to make happen?
"Pacing. Story. Payoffs. Setups. Moments. Surprises. All the stuff they're doing." In other words, responsible storytelling stuff to help the overall film, not conceited-actor meddling. "And then," he adds, "once in a while I'm, 'Please, guys—show me another take where I don't look like I'm taking a shit and screaming at the same time.' "
After this, he'll search for new problems. "I'm falling back into this unknown place," he says, "away from all these kinds of easy wins." His wife was already a successful movie producer when he met her. "I'm kind of saying, 'Honey, what do you think we should do?' That is the great luxury that that Avengers payday affords us." Their husband-and-wife production company is called Team Downey. "I like working with her. I'd rather just do stuff with her."
He hopes to start shooting the first Team Downey film in June, a movie called The Judge in which he will play the lawyer son of a superior-court judge. Its "beautiful story" was thought up by David Dobkin, director of Wedding Crashers, inspired by something in his own life. "It's funny as hell, but speaking of emo, it's just openly weeping reading the script. I don't know how I'm going to get through it. It's me and Robert Duvall, a father and son." After that, Downey has his eye on a new take on the Pinocchio story that he has pitched—"My first pitch!" he says with some glee—to Warner Bros. "I got real excited about it. I was just thinking about Geppetto as a cross between Jake LaMotta and Chico Marx. It's such a vital story, but it's really about this working-class weirdo who invests this inanimate object with all of the qualities he doesn't have. I'm just crazy about the idea.... To me a wooden boy is a real boy who doesn't feel like he's acknowledged."
In the years when Downey always seemed to be falling apart, the name of his father, the avant-garde filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., typically appeared in articles about his son attached to two anecdotes. The first related how his son's first film appearance, in a film written and directed by Downey Sr. called Pound, had him pretending to be a dog and saying to a man pretending to be a dog, "Have any hair on your balls?" Downey Jr. was 5. The second related how Downey Jr. began taking drugs with his father's blessing, smoking his first joint when he was 8 or 9. (Over time, such father-son bonding apparently only grew stronger. A few years ago, telling tales of the drug years, Downey Jr. referred to some cocaine as the only cocaine he'd had "that ever tasted as good as the coke I did with my dad and Jack Nicholson.") Whenever these two stories were wheeled out, the implication seemed to be that Downey Jr.'s troubles were somehow predestined or imposed or bequeathed, though he rarely claimed this as an excuse himself.
These days the son mentions the father often and fondly, particularly as the proud bearer of a filmmaking legacy that he would like to carry onward. It was also through his father that Downey became close with Paul Thomas Anderson: "He was actually friends with my pop first. And then finally the three of us got together for a meal, and then we kind of branched off. P.T. and I like ribbing each other. He goes, 'How does it feel to be the shortest superstar in the world?' And I say, 'It's amazing. And who tagged on that other act in the movie after Joaquin drove off on the motorcycle? Because the movie ended there, right?' He just laughs. We live to rib each other, because he is as far on one side of the scale as I am to the other, presently, in people's perception, and yet we could finish each other's sentences all day." They discussed the possibility that Downey might be in Anderson's next movie, an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, and Downey says that he was into it but that Anderson ultimately wanted to make the movie with Joaquin Phoenix. "I think he told me I'm too old," says Downey, amused. "Which I love when people tell me."
···
"It's rude for people not to show you their homes," he declares, and takes me on a tour through every single room of his house. We walk through the main bathroom, where he explains that he can't take baths at night because it's above Exton's bedroom, and then he leads me past his very modestly sized walk-in closet to their bedroom. The bed faces the sea. "This view," he says, "makes me happy."
At sunset we walk around the property. I meet his two cats, Monty (named after Field Marshal Montgomery) and Dart (D'Artagnan); his four alpacas, Fuzzy, Baby, Madre, and Dandy; and his two pygmy goats, Trigger and Memo. As we sweep past the guesthouse, he notes, "Even the very meticulous Jude Law felt comfortable staying there." (Fussy? I ask. "Let's just say he had a lot of clothes for a three-day visit," Downey replies.) He also shows me what he describes as "arguably the most expensive aboveground pool ever built—we call it the SS Debacle." The debacle began with Downey saying that he didn't want to worry about zoning, and so they should just get "one of those things that you put up like the Honey Boo Boo pool." That was several versions ago. A low point was when version two or three broke and rolled down the hill toward the ocean.
Back inside, I sit on a sofa in the living room. He sits on another sofa, but as he talks more about the life to come, he soon slides onto the carpet. "You know, I really miss composing music, writing music," he says. "And I want to direct—I think I'd do a pretty good job." It turns out that he has an idea. "Nobody," he says, "has cornered Halloween as a market since Halloween." He would act in it, too. "I will say only this: I am a Village Voice reporter on the run."
There's something fascinating—and perhaps very telltale of the odd and impressive person Robert Downey Jr. has grown into—about the fact that he wants to make this kind of movie, rather than some more obviously personal and cathartic vehicle for self-expression and artistry. "The funny thing is," he clarifies, "even the stuff that I would want to do as an artistic expression of my own I would like to do in a genre, I would like to do for a price, and I would like to be pretty much sure that it was going to be a hit before I started."
If focusing on these Team Downey projects will mean declining an awful lot of other movies, that's fine. "I love saying no," he explains. He also believes he has come to be a wise judge of what will be worthwhile. "I'm very good at deconstructing," he says. "I'm a very good troubleshooter for why something is unlikely to work. And most everything is unlikely to work."
Somewhat ironic, I point out, given that he spent the first twenty or so years of his acting career proving himself a spectacularly poor judge of what would or wouldn't work. But even as Downey acknowledges this point, he simply chooses to see it as one more point that falls in his favor.
"Yes!" he declares with gusto. "That's why I'm such an expert on it. I have done more movies that don't work than anyone. I could open a cottage industry telling you why your shit doesn't work."
···
Robert Downey Jr. was first nominated for an Oscar in 1993 after his remarkable depiction of Charlie Chaplin from a teenager to an 83-year-old in Chaplin. He lost to Al Pacino for his role in Scent of a Woman. "Which I'm sure he deserved," he says now, though at the time he was clearly disappointed. "You're talking Downey Version Minus 2.0," he says, "so yeah, I was 'This was my night....' " And anyway, Downey had a long history of believing that if he was taking part in something, he would win. He tells me how he used to come first in races at school against people who were faster by simply resolving that the best athlete—"that tall guy with blond hair"—wouldn't be allowed to go past him. Downey says this as though, even now, he still believes that making the decision is all that it takes. He also tells me how, auditioning for commercials when he was 17, he would go into the waiting room and say, "You guys can all go home—I just got it."
Downey was nominated again, in 2009 for Tropic Thunder, the movie he made directly after Iron Man: "this completely cathartic risky weird kind-of-wrong commedia dell'arte experience that so balanced out the commercialism of Iron Man." This time, it barely mattered whether he should have won or not, because everyone knew that the Oscar would be Heath Ledger's. But against the odds, Downey's depiction of a ludicrous acting conceit—an Australian Method actor playing an African-American soldier in a Vietnam War film—became a genuine acting tour de force of its own.
As for Downey's attitude toward Oscars these days, he shares it below. As he says what he says, he is clearly well aware of its comic effect, but my impression is that he is also simply trying to be honest.
How much would you like to win an Oscar?
"I couldn't care less."
Really?
"Well, I know it's going to happen."
Is that the persona or the person speaking?
"That's just a fact."
You're certain?
"I, personally, would be shocked if we went to the end of the tape now and I didn't have at least one."
Why?
"Because it just doesn't make sense. That's why I don't mind showing up and watching everybody else get them."
Why doesn't it make sense?
"Because I'm young enough, and I'm running down being occupied with these kind of genre movies, close enough. Even the next thing we're doing with the missus, I'm so confident about it. It's the best script the studio has; it's the best thing I've read in years. You know, honestly, my real answer to that is: I don't care. I used to think I cared, and I couldn't care less. Now, I'm not saying I wouldn't get a little choked up, but it is amazing to see how people are literally hyperventilating when they get up there, because they have such an attachment to this outcome. I mean, it's not like we're at the fucking Olympics or something."
He tempers his view, a little.
"Look, even if I don't get one directly, eventually they're just going to have to give me one when I get old. So no matter how you slice it, I'm getting one."
Just to check: Will one be enough?
"No, I should probably have more. But zero's fine." The humility sits there alone for a moment, just long enough to get lonely. "Zero, or two."
Downey holds in his hands the head of the character who set his life on a new trajectory and examines it.
"It is funny, dude," he says. "I do contemplate this thing."
Downey commissioned a jeweler to make a set of these heads as gifts for crew members when Iron Man 3 wrapped, but he kept one for himself and it is now his to ponder at his leisure. "There's some sort of strange message about something in there," he says. "Just about masks, and what people create. I still haven't figured it out. There's no rush."
Downey remembers staring at an image of that stoic gleaming helmet, as he tried to work out what it would take to be the man inside it, when he was preparing for his Iron Man audition in 2006. It is easy to forget what a strange place Robert Downey's career was in back then, and not just because of the long trail of upheavals—the drugs, the guns, the arrests, the rehabs, the prison sentences—that could have destroyed it.
For years, whenever Downey appeared on TV, he was routinely introduced as "one of the greatest actors of his generation." (Downey's demeanor on such occasions suggested that such statements expressed a truth so obvious it barely needed repeating.) What was less apparent, until you looked with a cold empirical stare at the whole sweep of his career, was that he was also one of the least successful actors of his generation, almost unbelievably so. The biggest hit he had ever been in was the long-forgotten 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School, which came out when he was 21. After that, no matter what fanfare each new movie arrived with, and no matter how often Downey's own contribution would be highlighted, it was disappointment after disappointment. His two best and most notable performances in those years were in Less Than Zero and Chaplin, but both were commercial flops. When he chose movies so commercial that their success seemed predestined—Air America in 1990 with perhaps the biggest star of that era, Mel Gibson; The Fugitive sequel, U.S. Marshals, in 1998—the rebuke of their failure seemed almost humiliating.
Downey suggests now that he began to see this pattern as a statistical aberration. "The odds were against it," he argues. "Most people, they've been around twenty years or more, just even by accident they were in something that made a ton of dough." But that was the one accident he seemed incapable of getting himself into. At times, he'd wonder if it was worth it. "Some part of me," he says, "and this is maybe some injured part of me, has been looking to say 'I quit! I retire!' since whenever."
Still, in the middle of the past decade things started looking up. He married the film producer Susan Levin, finally seemed to be putting some sustainable distance between himself and his addiction problems, started doing what he considered "solid work with people I liked to work with," and discovered that he was, as he puts it, "incredibly happy." Yet a certain kind of success (the kind, let's be blunt, commonly known just as "success") continued to elude him. In 2005 it happened once again, this time with the comedic noir Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. This was a particularly tough blow—it was well reviewed, Downey was proud of his part in it, and his wife had produced it. "And then," he remembers, "watching it come out and make eighty-five bucks..."
I ask him what he was thinking at that point.
"In two words: 'Where's mine?' "
He might've been justified in concluding that this was how it would be from now on—that the moment for Downey to be a star had passed, and he should expect the same future as many other talented middle-aged actors: occasional good parts in small movies, occasional small parts in big movies, maybe an extended run in one of the new breed of smart TV dramas. But Downey remained stubbornly confident that his was still out there somewhere. "I felt like a fighter who was training for a title bout that had not been booked yet," he says.
Then he heard about Iron Man. Knowing what we know now, Downey's fixation on the role makes the best possible sense. But nothing was so obvious at the time. Starring as a Marvel comic-book hero on the big screen might sound like a sure route to a big audience and guaranteed success, but plenty of actors had already learned otherwise. (Ask Eric Bana. Or Edward Norton. Or Ben Affleck. Or Jennifer Garner.) And Iron Man wasn't even considered in the first tier of Marvel heroes.
But Downey was obsessed with the notion that the part should be his. "I don't know why," he says. "I do like a bit of Jung, and it was just this kind of numinous thing." Even after the film's director, Jon Favreau, passed on the word from Marvel that it wasn't going to happen, Downey refused to listen. (Favreau later explained that Marvel had actually been even more definite: "Under no circumstances are we prepared to hire him for any price.") Downey persisted nonetheless, and eventually he was told he'd at least get a screen test.
He had three weeks to ready himself. The way Downey describes what happened in that period seems itself like an origin montage from a superhero story: a time of focused preparation and of "spiritual/ ritualistic processes" that he still considers private and prefers not to detail. He worked on the scenes over and over: "The missus says she could've woken me up in the middle of the night and I'd have recited the audition dialogue in double time."
"It was all shock, awe, conquer—it was about devastating the competition," he says. When he walked into the room at Raleigh Studios, he was ready. "Right before the first take I felt like I almost left my body—a sudden surge of nerves," he says, and remembers wondering whether they had noticed. "Then, all of a sudden, it was like coasting downhill on an old Schwinn Cruiser, like I could do no wrong."
Since then, very little in Downey's career has gone wrong. It's hard to think of another reversal of movie fortune quite so dramatic, certainly for a fortysomething actor: a huge Iron Man sequel (and one assumes the third will be similarly massive), acclaim and commercial success for Tropic Thunder, the similarly thriving Sherlock Holmes franchise, the astonishing record-breaking feats of The Avengers, all of them not just featuring Downey but powered by him at their center. Everything that failed to work for him for so long now seemed to work effortlessly, and these were not all obvious triumphs. Think about Sherlock Holmes: Were there really many good reasons to believe that a movie set in Victorian England with Guy Ritchie directing would result in anything but a messy, ill-disciplined misfire? And yet every single movie on that list has been far more successful than any he had previously been involved with. It is, he concedes, "the sweet spot that kind of continued."
I ask whether he has been doing something better to make all this happen. He thinks for a while, and when he answers he does so seriously.
"We work weekends," he says. "This is not a 'Monday through Friday and then let's go and party in Aspen' thing. We work weekends."
···
Conversations with Robert Downey Jr. are rarely linear, and sometimes it takes a moment to realize how one thing might relate to the next. But I realize after a while that if you keep up with him, hang on tight, and have faith, all kinds of strange sense may eventually be made. "That's the great thing—it's such a floating freak show," he tells me at one point about the movie world. "You get a bit older and you start to see what's going on backstage in the collective psyche of this ridiculous industry."
What do you notice?
"Everybody is kind of the same. I'm sorry! We're all just kind of the same."
What do you mean?
"Nothing pleases me more than when somebody who was awe-inspired to be working with me realizes I'm just another schmuck that they're bored of hanging out with on a set. I love that moment. I like it when that persistent illusion is smashed."
But how does that fit in with something you've often said—that you have to believe you're the most talented person on any set?
"Well, I try to instill that in other people, but it only gets you so far. That to me is just the precursor for even getting up, because nobody wants to see somebody struggling with their own confidence—it's boring and it takes a long time and you're probably not going to get there."
But I still believe that you think you're almost always the most talented person there.
"Yeah, but you know what? I'm afraid that's just a tape that's running in my head, and I'm really happy that it's there, but it doesn't make it real."
And so if you stop that tape running for a second, how talented are you?
He smiles. "I'm probably one of the best."
That was you speaking, and not the tape?
"Yeah. But it's not that big a deal. It's not like this is the greatest swath or generation of actors that has ever come down the pike."
What are you bad at as an actor?
"Tons. Everything I avoid. I don't like opening doors and looking surprised. I can do all that emo stuff, but I'm so over everyone who has to have a meltdown— everybody is emotional all the time. In movies people seem to be more emotional than they would ever be if that situation was actually happening to them."
No shit.
"Yeah. And the funny thing is: People eat that up. It's not that I'm better than that or I've transcended that, it's that...I don't know...once you've been in Amsterdam and you've been in some weird magazine shop and you see some title like Hond Seks"—literally translated as "dog sex," by which he means "sex with dogs"—"you just don't want to go to that part of town anymore."
Hold on, you've just compared acting a bit overemotionally to—
"—To bestiality! Yeah. I'm sorry, but they're both these kind of grotesque things. I don't want to say they're grotesque, but I have a reaction to it. I know you go there and you do it and it works and people eat it up, but..."
You're talking about bestiality, I presume.
"Now, I'm not saying there isn't a genuine connection between these people and their animals. And that they're not sad when they go, the next morning...."
We talk in various places on the Downeys' Malibu estate. We begin at a table outside, where the lawns begin to slope downhill toward the glistening Pacific, while Downey's chef serves us lunch: shepherd's pie. Downey is just starting a three-week cleanse, so he tells me that this will be his only proper meal of the day. On the patio nearby is a metal robot. He has an ax in one hand and a potato peeler in the other. "Which I think is pretty awesome," says Downey. "He might kill you, or we might make some string fries together."
After lunch we lounge for an hour or two in his wife's office. His assistant brings us green tea, which Downey is using during the cleanse to stave off the no-coffee headaches. At one point, talking about the future, Downey begins a sentence, "If I want to grow as an artist I have to be willing..." and then pulls himself to a halt. " 'Artist!' " he repeats in self-mockery, and starts again using different words. Afterward, I ask him why he recanted "artist."
"Because it's not that serious and it's not that artistic," he says. He points to a painting on the wall next to his wife's desk. "That's art—that's a Miró." He finds a further way of dramatizing the difference. "There was no poster telling you that he was going to be coming out with that."
There's a lot of this kind of art in the house. Among the many pieces in just this room, there's a Giacometti drawing behind me and a Banksy in the middle of the wall to my left. And the Miró. "Honey likes Mirós," he says. "She's crazy about them. We've got a bunch of them. We don't have a collection, per se. There's smatterings." (There is a slight marital divergence on this issue, of the kind you can indulge when you've had a chain of recent hits like Downey's: "I like Picasso—she likes Miró.") Also on the wall here, just by the Miró, is a photographic triptych of the Downeys' 1-year-old son documenting the first time Exton ate spinach, with fairly calamitous results.
A while later Susan brings in Exton for a visit. She hands him to Downey. "I think he peed through," she says, "but if you don't mind."
"How did my diaper hold up?" he asks.
"Great," she says.
"Good," he says. "Felt like I nailed it." He talks to his son. "Can you take a couple of steps? Show off?" His son delivers. "Good boy." Downey points out that Exton's bloodline is, thanks to his wife's influence, far more normal than his.
"We have eccentric people on my side of the family," Susan protests. "We just don't have any..." She pauses there.
"...Aberrant behaviors?" suggests Downey. "Yes," she says.
"Thank you," says Downey.
"Those were the words I was dodging," she says. As they leave, he kisses his wife, then his son, and then his son one more time on the flesh of his back. I ask him whether it seems surreal to him—his life now compared with fifteen years ago. Or is surreal the wrong word?
"No, it's not the wrong word," he says, and mentions that when he was out walking Exton in his stroller around the neighborhood this morning, he was remembering how he used to do the same when his first son was young. "Life," he says, "is just so painful and messy and hard and worth it and all that stuff."
···
Before the recent upturn in his career, Downey says that he was not a wealthy man. "The missus has always been able to pull in some ducats here and there," he says. "I was definitely leaning on her for a while. And happily so, I might add. I would make a great deadbeat husband—I would have no problem with that whatsoever."
You didn't have a few million dollars stashed somewhere?
"No."
Did that irk you?
"Very much so. I had gotten into all this tax trouble, which I highly recommend to anyone who thinks that any of their life problems are annoying—get some tax trouble, and that will take your mind off everything else."
Had you messed up?
"Probably. I didn't do any of it willfully. You have a little bit of dough and you can manage everything. You have a little bit more dough, and you reach out toward the boundaries of where you think you can now go, and the wind blows the wrong way and you're fucked for five years."
Fortunately, few things un-fuck you better, in this respect, than starring in a string of huge-grossing movies. And any lingering financial pressures have been further eased by the success of The Avengers. Downey has taken pride in being deeply involved in every stage of the solo Iron Man movies, but for The Avengers he fitted into Joss Whedon's wider vision. "I really just showed up, hit my marks," he says. "Joss would write some lines or I would come up with a line. It was very easy—it was so easy I didn't see how it could work." Whatever contract Downey signed when he agreed to appear in multiple movies as Iron Man allowed him a share of The Avengers' payday far bigger than anyone could have anticipated. The Hollywood Reporter recently suggested that the true figure was around $50 million. It's not the kind of thing most actors are prepared to talk about, but I ask Downey anyway.
"Yeah," he says, smiling.
Is that number about right?
"Yeah." A broader smile.
That's amazing.
"Isn't that crazy?" he says. "They're so pissed. I can't believe it. I'm what's known as 'a strategic cost.' "
Is it easy for you to believe that you're the same person who spent all that time in prison?
"Yeah."
It just makes perfect sense to you?
"Nothing makes perfect sense. I've explored it so much, and right now I just look back at it as: It was certainly character-building."
But that seems almost deliberately glib.
"It's not like I went to war, and if you talk to some people who come back from doing a tour, they're pretty glib. I think what they're indicating by that is 'I'm processing it at my own speed...and let me let you know that the fact that I'm here gives me reason to be glib. Because back there is not like here.' "
I ask Downey what was the key thing that finally enabled him to move away from where he was and how he used to be. He suggests that any answer he gives today might be different from an answer yesterday or tomorrow. "What would I say?" he considers. "I fell in love?" He offers this in a way that seems to say: That's certainly true, but if you imagine that any one answer can fill the gap that follows a question like that, then you don't really have a clue what it is that you're asking about.
"Any of my answers," he adds, "always have to do with: I stopped worrying about fixing things and just dealt with what was right in front of me. The bouncing ball of the moment."
···
Downey knows that no ball can bounce forever like his has in recent years. "This period of time, this shall pass," he says. "Fortunately I've been around the block enough—I'm not ill-prepared. And I love change. I love it when a lightning bolt hits the genny and you're down for two hours on the set. Now, this isn't a lightning strike, this is like the warning of a gathering storm."
When I ask him what the gathering storm is in this case, he answers by telling me about the injury he sustained on the Iron Man 3 set in North Carolina that shut down production for several weeks. He was doing the kind of wire jump he's done hundreds of times over the past few years, and he blew his ankle out.
"It got me thinking about how big the message from your cosmic sponsor needs to be before you pick it up. How many genre movies can I do? How many follow-ups to a successful follow-up are actually fun? Because, as quiet as it's kept, I come from a family of very innovative writers and directors and actors and artists, and the circle of friends they were in were the people I heard having pun-offs playing poker at two in the morning, and it was just the most comforting aspect of my childhood. So there's this kind of legacy of souls from what I consider to be a very particular time in entertainment, and I'm sensing a return to that—it's what me and the missus are doing next. It's not unlike: I heard Brady signed on for three more years with New England, and then he's done being a QB, because he'll be 40. I'm 47, and I'll be 50."
So that's the line in your head at the moment?
"Yeah, roughly."
So what stops at 50? Superheroes?
"I don't know. I don't know. Right now I don't have a contract to do anything, and I did for the last five years."
Would you really walk away if they offer you a respectful deal for Iron Man 4, Iron Man 5?
"Here's the thing. At whatever point I'm done with this, I'm going to have a bit of a crisis, because I probably haven't even fully ingested how much I've enjoyed it, how much it's meant. It so came out of kind of relative obscurity as this second-tier character from the Marvel universe, and I feel I was part of making it something more. But it also to me was just good filmmaking. It's funny, people will come up to me and go, 'Dude, how do you do it? How do you dress up and play these...?' While whatsisname is shooting the next David O. Russell or whatever, I'm, 'Here's the thing, you're either having a good time or a bad time, and you're either doing a good movie or a bad movie.' And I know one thing, which is that there is no guarantee that doing a movie you think is 'important' "—Downey enunciates the word important in a wonderfully withering way—"isn't going to be the worst piece of tripe I've ever had to sit through. Or that this kind of two-dimensional genre movie I'm doing isn't actually going to be thoroughly entertaining. Isn't that why you went to the movies to begin with? Whatever."
In the meantime, Downey is fully involved in making sure that Iron Man 3 becomes all that he believes it should be. In recent days, he has been a regular visitor to the editing suite, not a place where the lead actor in a film is usually either found or welcome. I ask Downey what his input is when he goes. What is he trying to make happen?
"Pacing. Story. Payoffs. Setups. Moments. Surprises. All the stuff they're doing." In other words, responsible storytelling stuff to help the overall film, not conceited-actor meddling. "And then," he adds, "once in a while I'm, 'Please, guys—show me another take where I don't look like I'm taking a shit and screaming at the same time.' "
After this, he'll search for new problems. "I'm falling back into this unknown place," he says, "away from all these kinds of easy wins." His wife was already a successful movie producer when he met her. "I'm kind of saying, 'Honey, what do you think we should do?' That is the great luxury that that Avengers payday affords us." Their husband-and-wife production company is called Team Downey. "I like working with her. I'd rather just do stuff with her."
He hopes to start shooting the first Team Downey film in June, a movie called The Judge in which he will play the lawyer son of a superior-court judge. Its "beautiful story" was thought up by David Dobkin, director of Wedding Crashers, inspired by something in his own life. "It's funny as hell, but speaking of emo, it's just openly weeping reading the script. I don't know how I'm going to get through it. It's me and Robert Duvall, a father and son." After that, Downey has his eye on a new take on the Pinocchio story that he has pitched—"My first pitch!" he says with some glee—to Warner Bros. "I got real excited about it. I was just thinking about Geppetto as a cross between Jake LaMotta and Chico Marx. It's such a vital story, but it's really about this working-class weirdo who invests this inanimate object with all of the qualities he doesn't have. I'm just crazy about the idea.... To me a wooden boy is a real boy who doesn't feel like he's acknowledged."
In the years when Downey always seemed to be falling apart, the name of his father, the avant-garde filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., typically appeared in articles about his son attached to two anecdotes. The first related how his son's first film appearance, in a film written and directed by Downey Sr. called Pound, had him pretending to be a dog and saying to a man pretending to be a dog, "Have any hair on your balls?" Downey Jr. was 5. The second related how Downey Jr. began taking drugs with his father's blessing, smoking his first joint when he was 8 or 9. (Over time, such father-son bonding apparently only grew stronger. A few years ago, telling tales of the drug years, Downey Jr. referred to some cocaine as the only cocaine he'd had "that ever tasted as good as the coke I did with my dad and Jack Nicholson.") Whenever these two stories were wheeled out, the implication seemed to be that Downey Jr.'s troubles were somehow predestined or imposed or bequeathed, though he rarely claimed this as an excuse himself.
These days the son mentions the father often and fondly, particularly as the proud bearer of a filmmaking legacy that he would like to carry onward. It was also through his father that Downey became close with Paul Thomas Anderson: "He was actually friends with my pop first. And then finally the three of us got together for a meal, and then we kind of branched off. P.T. and I like ribbing each other. He goes, 'How does it feel to be the shortest superstar in the world?' And I say, 'It's amazing. And who tagged on that other act in the movie after Joaquin drove off on the motorcycle? Because the movie ended there, right?' He just laughs. We live to rib each other, because he is as far on one side of the scale as I am to the other, presently, in people's perception, and yet we could finish each other's sentences all day." They discussed the possibility that Downey might be in Anderson's next movie, an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, and Downey says that he was into it but that Anderson ultimately wanted to make the movie with Joaquin Phoenix. "I think he told me I'm too old," says Downey, amused. "Which I love when people tell me."
···
"It's rude for people not to show you their homes," he declares, and takes me on a tour through every single room of his house. We walk through the main bathroom, where he explains that he can't take baths at night because it's above Exton's bedroom, and then he leads me past his very modestly sized walk-in closet to their bedroom. The bed faces the sea. "This view," he says, "makes me happy."
At sunset we walk around the property. I meet his two cats, Monty (named after Field Marshal Montgomery) and Dart (D'Artagnan); his four alpacas, Fuzzy, Baby, Madre, and Dandy; and his two pygmy goats, Trigger and Memo. As we sweep past the guesthouse, he notes, "Even the very meticulous Jude Law felt comfortable staying there." (Fussy? I ask. "Let's just say he had a lot of clothes for a three-day visit," Downey replies.) He also shows me what he describes as "arguably the most expensive aboveground pool ever built—we call it the SS Debacle." The debacle began with Downey saying that he didn't want to worry about zoning, and so they should just get "one of those things that you put up like the Honey Boo Boo pool." That was several versions ago. A low point was when version two or three broke and rolled down the hill toward the ocean.
Back inside, I sit on a sofa in the living room. He sits on another sofa, but as he talks more about the life to come, he soon slides onto the carpet. "You know, I really miss composing music, writing music," he says. "And I want to direct—I think I'd do a pretty good job." It turns out that he has an idea. "Nobody," he says, "has cornered Halloween as a market since Halloween." He would act in it, too. "I will say only this: I am a Village Voice reporter on the run."
There's something fascinating—and perhaps very telltale of the odd and impressive person Robert Downey Jr. has grown into—about the fact that he wants to make this kind of movie, rather than some more obviously personal and cathartic vehicle for self-expression and artistry. "The funny thing is," he clarifies, "even the stuff that I would want to do as an artistic expression of my own I would like to do in a genre, I would like to do for a price, and I would like to be pretty much sure that it was going to be a hit before I started."
If focusing on these Team Downey projects will mean declining an awful lot of other movies, that's fine. "I love saying no," he explains. He also believes he has come to be a wise judge of what will be worthwhile. "I'm very good at deconstructing," he says. "I'm a very good troubleshooter for why something is unlikely to work. And most everything is unlikely to work."
Somewhat ironic, I point out, given that he spent the first twenty or so years of his acting career proving himself a spectacularly poor judge of what would or wouldn't work. But even as Downey acknowledges this point, he simply chooses to see it as one more point that falls in his favor.
"Yes!" he declares with gusto. "That's why I'm such an expert on it. I have done more movies that don't work than anyone. I could open a cottage industry telling you why your shit doesn't work."
···
Robert Downey Jr. was first nominated for an Oscar in 1993 after his remarkable depiction of Charlie Chaplin from a teenager to an 83-year-old in Chaplin. He lost to Al Pacino for his role in Scent of a Woman. "Which I'm sure he deserved," he says now, though at the time he was clearly disappointed. "You're talking Downey Version Minus 2.0," he says, "so yeah, I was 'This was my night....' " And anyway, Downey had a long history of believing that if he was taking part in something, he would win. He tells me how he used to come first in races at school against people who were faster by simply resolving that the best athlete—"that tall guy with blond hair"—wouldn't be allowed to go past him. Downey says this as though, even now, he still believes that making the decision is all that it takes. He also tells me how, auditioning for commercials when he was 17, he would go into the waiting room and say, "You guys can all go home—I just got it."
Downey was nominated again, in 2009 for Tropic Thunder, the movie he made directly after Iron Man: "this completely cathartic risky weird kind-of-wrong commedia dell'arte experience that so balanced out the commercialism of Iron Man." This time, it barely mattered whether he should have won or not, because everyone knew that the Oscar would be Heath Ledger's. But against the odds, Downey's depiction of a ludicrous acting conceit—an Australian Method actor playing an African-American soldier in a Vietnam War film—became a genuine acting tour de force of its own.
As for Downey's attitude toward Oscars these days, he shares it below. As he says what he says, he is clearly well aware of its comic effect, but my impression is that he is also simply trying to be honest.
How much would you like to win an Oscar?
"I couldn't care less."
Really?
"Well, I know it's going to happen."
Is that the persona or the person speaking?
"That's just a fact."
You're certain?
"I, personally, would be shocked if we went to the end of the tape now and I didn't have at least one."
Why?
"Because it just doesn't make sense. That's why I don't mind showing up and watching everybody else get them."
Why doesn't it make sense?
"Because I'm young enough, and I'm running down being occupied with these kind of genre movies, close enough. Even the next thing we're doing with the missus, I'm so confident about it. It's the best script the studio has; it's the best thing I've read in years. You know, honestly, my real answer to that is: I don't care. I used to think I cared, and I couldn't care less. Now, I'm not saying I wouldn't get a little choked up, but it is amazing to see how people are literally hyperventilating when they get up there, because they have such an attachment to this outcome. I mean, it's not like we're at the fucking Olympics or something."
He tempers his view, a little.
"Look, even if I don't get one directly, eventually they're just going to have to give me one when I get old. So no matter how you slice it, I'm getting one."
Just to check: Will one be enough?
"No, I should probably have more. But zero's fine." The humility sits there alone for a moment, just long enough to get lonely. "Zero, or two."
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