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Robert Downey Jr’s Hollywood career is a tale for the ages and one of the greatest comebacks ever. The iconic nature of his most famous character, Tony Stark, however, has caused a misguided perception of who Downey is as a real-life person.
“I ain’t him, I’ll tell you that flat out,” he told Vanity Fair on the set of Avengers: Endgame as part of their cover story with a career retrospective. “There’s always a bit of a burn-off period when they run out of call sheets for me in any of these movies, and I go back to being a little bit more of just…I’m just a f**king actor. I’m just a guy–who does have a very interesting past, who does not regret it, who wished to shut the door on it. I think that that translates.”
From being a teen heartthrob and joining the SNL cast, albeit briefly, to getting an Oscar nomination at the age of 27, his resume is one of the most eclectic of his generation. From there, his trials and tribulations with his drug addiction are notoriously infamous, and he was deemed radioactive for almost a decade.
Being cast as Tony Stark/Iron Man in 2006 was the beginning of his second coming, and he quickly found himself an A-lister once Iron Man struck box-office gold. With the Marvel movies came iron-clad commitments and was tethered to his schedule, rarely taking outside work. Downey had only made six movies in between his 10 Marvel ones since 2008–though Tropic Thunder hit theaters the same year as Iron Man, and earned him another Oscar. Downey is ready to return to that and wants to separate himself from Stark as much as he can, despite being constantly compared.
Downey’s version of Stark has been since mirrored in other media, especially on the animated Avengers: Earth’s Mightest Heroes when voice actor Eric Loomis blatantly impersonates Downey down to syllable infractions.
Downey is considered a strong contender for another Oscar, this time as Best Supporting Actor playing Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer. He’s already picked up the award in certain film festivals, including Atlanta Film Critics Circle, tying with Ryan Gosling for Barbie.
While there were rumors that Downey would be returning to the role in some way, possibly via a multiverse scenario, Kevin Feige confirmed that would be happening.
“We are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again,” the producer said in the same Vanity Fair piece. “We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way.”
