robert downey jr biography.com

Robert Downey Jr.

Actor Robert Downey Jr. is known for roles in a wide variety of movies, including Iron Man , The Avengers , and Sherlock Holmes. He won an Academy Award for the 2023 biopic Oppenheimer .

1965-present

Latest news: Robert Downey Jr. Wins Best Supporting Actor Oscar

Iron Man is officially an Oscar winner.

The 58-year-old vacillated between earnestness and self-deprecating humor throughout his acceptance speech. “I’d like to thank my terrible childhood and the Academy—in that order,” he started off. Later, he took a frank turn: “Here’s my little secret: I needed this job more than it needed me.”

Downey swept the this year’s awards season. He won at the Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice Awards, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Similarly, Oppenheimer enjoyed a successful run and entered the 2024 Oscars as the most nominated movie .

Quick Facts

Early movies and snl, movies of critical acclaim, substance abuse problems, move to television with ally mcbeal, box office hits, awards for oppenheimer, wife and children, path to sobriety, who is robert downey jr..

Actor Robert Downey Jr. is best known for his portrayal of Tony Stark, a.k.a superhero Iron Man, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film franchise and roles in movies like Chaplin , Tropic Thunder . Downey made his first movie appearances and was a cast member on Saturday Night Live in the 1980s, but his growing success was marred by years of struggles with drug abuse. Eventually turning his life around, he earned a resurgence of critical and widespread acclaim and is now considered one of Hollywood’s A-list actors. Downey most recently gave an Oscar-winning performance as Lewis Strauss in the 2023 biopic Oppenheimer .

FULL NAME: Robert John Downey Jr. BORN: April 4, 1965 BIRTHPLACE: New York City SPOUSES: Deborah Falconer (1992-2004) and Susan Levin (2005-present) CHILDREN: Indio, Exton, and Avri ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aries

Famed actor Robert Downey Jr. was born on April 4, 1965, in New York City, the son of the avant-garde filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., best known for the 1969 film Putney Swope . Downey began acting as a young child. His mother, Elsie, was an actress who instilled in her son a love of performing. Raised in Greenwich Village with his older sister, Alison, Downey made his film debut playing a puppy in his father’s film Pound (1970), in which actors played dogs. He would go on to have small parts in several more of his father’s films.

Downey’s parents divorced when he was 13, and the young actor ended up living in Los Angeles with his father. At 16, however, he dropped out of high school and was on the move again, relocating to New York to live with his mother.

Downey made his earliest feature film appearances in such films as Baby, It’s You (1983), Firstborn (1984), Weird Science (1985) and Back to School (1986). From 1985 to ’86, he was a regular cast member of Saturday Night Live , NBC’s popular sketch-comedy program.

The Pick-up Artist and Less Than Zero

Downey’s first leading role on the big screen was as a charming womanizer in The Pick-up Artist (1987), a romantic comedy co-starring Molly Ringwald written and directed by James Toback. His breakthrough performance came in 1987 with Less Than Zero (1987), where he co-starred with Andrew McCarthy. Downey played the party-loving, cocaine-addicted Julian Wells in the film.

By the early 1990s, Downey had established a reputation as a critically acclaimed A-List actor. He earned praise for his comic turn as a shifty soap opera producer in Soapdish (1991), co-starring Sally Field , Kevin Kline, and Whoopi Goldberg . More adoration followed when Downey landed a featured role in Short Cuts (1993), the critically lauded ensemble film by Robert Altman.

A particular high point in Downey’s career came in 1993 when he was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Actor) for his performance in Chaplin (1992), directed by Richard Attenborough. In the highly acclaimed film, which didn’t go over nearly as well with audiences as with critics, Downey nimbly portrayed the legendary Charlie Chaplin from ages 19 to 83. The role displayed his dramatic range and his considerable talent for physical comedy. By this time, the 27-year-old Downey had come to be seen as one of the most gifted actors of his generation, but he had also earned a reputation as a troubled and controversial figure in Hollywood.

Natural Born Killers and Richard III

In the wake of his critical success with Chaplin , Downey anchored a documentary about the 1992 presidential election, The Last Party . In 1994, he appeared in the romantic comedy Only You , and in Oliver Stone ’s acclaimed but controversial Natural Born Killers . The following year, the actor starred in the period film Restoration alongside Meg Ryan and Sam Neill; an updated film version of Richard III , co-starring Ian McKellen and Annette Bening ; and the Jodie Foster -directed Home for the Holidays , also starring Holly Hunter.

While Downey’s acting prospects appeared on track, his personal life would be in turmoil for the next few years. Downey was introduced to drugs at the age of 8 by his father and developed a full-fledged addiction as he headed into his 20s.

“Until ( Less Than Zero ), I took my drugs after work and on the weekends,” he later explained. “Maybe I’d turn up hungover on the set, but no more so than the stuntman. That changed on Less Than Zero ... 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.”

A stint in drug rehabilitation followed shortly afterward, but Downey’s struggles with drugs and alcohol would persist for years. In June 1996, the actor was stopped by police after driving naked in his Porsche on Sunset Boulevard and found not only to be without clothes but in possession of cocaine, heroin, and a .357 Magnum. Less than a month later, and just a few hours before he was slated to be charged, Downey ran afoul of the law again after he was found passed out in a neighbor's house.

For the next several years, Downey’s life was a haze of headline-generating, dependency-induced mistakes and their consequences. There was a 12-month stay in prison and another visit to drug rehab. In November 2000, Downey was again arrested, this time in a Palm Springs hotel room, where he was discovered with cocaine and in a Wonder Woman costume. He was charged with felony drug possession.

Downey’s trial, initially set for late January, was delayed for several months while his lawyers negotiated with prosecutors. In March 2001, the two sides failed to reach a plea bargain, and the case was set for a preliminary hearing at the end of April. On April 24, 2001, Downey was arrested for allegedly being under the influence of an undisclosed “stimulant.”

Despite his turmoil in the early 2000s, Downey continued working. He gave a memorable performance in Wonder Boys (2000) and had roles in several other films, including Auto Motives and Lethargy . Additionally, Downey moved to the small screen in 2000, becoming a regular cast member of the popular show Ally McBeal , starring Calista Flockhart. Downey once again reminded fans and critics of his talent, likability, and versatility with this new role. He went on to pick up a 2001 Golden Globe Award and won a Screen Actors Guild Award soon after.

But Downey’s increasingly complicated personal life pressed his employer's patience. After that second arrest in April 2001, Downey's tenure on Ally McBeal ended; producers had decided to wrap production of the final episodes of the season without the actor. Around this same time, lawyers reached an agreement with prosecutors that required Downey to plead no contest to cocaine-related charges. He was sentenced to three years’ probation—a ruling that allowed him to continue live-in drug treatment instead of returning to prison.

Working his way back to prominence, Downey in 2003 starred opposite Halle Berry in Gothika , which fared better at the box office than it did with the critics. He continued to dedicate himself to his craft, playing a supporting role in the critically acclaimed Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) and the lead in the independent drama A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006), which he also co-produced. In Zodiac (2007), Downey plays a journalist who gets wrapped up in the hunt for the infamous Zodiac Killer.

Tropic Thunder

Taking a huge risk, Downey starred in the comedy Tropic Thunder (2008) with Ben Stiller and Jack Black ; he played a white actor pretending to be a Black actor in this war movie spoof. His efforts received primarily positive reviews, with Variety magazine’s Todd McCarthy stating that “the audacity of Downey’s performance” was one of “the best reasons to see the film.” Downey garnered numerous accolades for his performance in Tropic Thunder , including Oscar (Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role), Golden Globe (Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture), and Screen Actors Guild (Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role) nominations.

Iron Man and The Avengers Franchise

That same year, Downey established himself as a box office star by playing wealthy industrialist-turned-crime fighter Tony Stark in the smash hit Iron Man , based on the Marvel Comics superhero. The film grossed more than $318 million domestically, leading to the release of sequels in 2010 and 2013.

Stark would also become one of the central characters in the series of Marvel Cinematic Universe films that followed, headlined by The Avengers in 2012 and its three sequels later in the decade. The movies featured a bevy of Hollywood talent as iconic Marvel heroes, including Chris Evans (Captain America), Don Cheadle (Colonel James “Rhodey” Rhodes), Mark Ruffalo (Hulk), Samuel Jackson (Nick Fury) and Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow), among others.

Downey would reprise his Stark/Iron Man dual role for Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015); Captain America: Civil War (2016); Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017); Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019).

The Soloist and Sherlock Holmes

Downey went on to share top billing with Jamie Foxx in The Soloist (2009), which tells the story of the friendship between a Los Angeles journalist (Downey) and a homeless Juilliard-trained musician (Foxx). The film registered a respectable showing at the box office and earned praise from critics, who lauded Downey and Foxx for their performances.

Demonstrating he isn’t afraid of blockbusters (or English accents), Downey co-starred in the Guy Ritchie-directed Sherlock Holmes in 2009 alongside Jude Law as Dr. John Watson. The duo teamed up again for the 2011 sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows .

Downey also offered a turn as sharp city lawyer Hank Palmer, opposite Robert Duvall, in the drama The Judge (2014).

After a half-decade of appearing solely in Marvel-branded features, Downey reemerged as host of the YouTube series The Age of AI beginning in late 2019. In January 2020, he starred as a veterinarian who talks to animals in Dolittle , based on the classic children’s book series by British author Hugh Lofting.

Downey took a short hiatus from the big screen following Dolittle and focused on his work as a producer. In 2022, he appeared in and served as an executive producer for Sr. , a documentary film about the life and career of his father.

However, Downey Jr. would draw critical acclaim for his next big performance in 2023, portraying Lewis Strauss in the blockbuster biopic Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan . Although Nolan had not worked closely with the actor in the past, he contacted Downey directly regarding the role and invited him to read the screenplay for the movie—about American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb. “I felt like (Downey) just was in a place where he would be ready to come and try something completely different. And as a director, if you can convince one of the great actors of his generation to come and challenge himself in a completely different way, you just know you’re going to get something special,” Nolan told Vanity Fair .

Oppenheimer , also starring Cillian Murphy , Emily Blunt , Florence Pugh , and Matt Damon , became the third-highest-grossing movie of the year globally and was universally praised. In 2024, Downey won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor along with comparable awards at the Golden Globes, BAFTAs, Critics’ Choice Awards, and Screen Actors Guild Awards.

In contrast to his prior history with the law, Downey has a much more stable home life these days. He met producer Susan Levin on the set of Gothika in 2003, and the two were engaged in November of that year. They married in August 2005 and have two children: son Exton, born in February 2012, and daughter Avri, born in November 2014.

In June 2010, Downey and Levin began their Team Downey production company, producing films and TV shows such as The Judge (2014), Dolittle (2020), and the Netflix fantasy series Sweet Tooth . “We don’t like going too long without having an extremely difficult project together, whether it’s a movie or a kid,” Downey said jokingly in 2020.

Downey also has his eldest son, Indio (born September 1993), from his prior relationship with singer and actor Deborah Falconer, whom he married in 1992. The couple separated in 1996 and finalized their divorce in 2004.

Downey’s friend and fellow actor Anthony Michael Hall is Indio’s godfather.

Downey began to seek serious treatment for his drug addiction around 2003 and has maintained his sobriety amid his career resurgence.

One of the people to play a key role in the actor’s turnaround was Mel Gibson , with whom Downey co-starred in Air America (1990). Gibson stuck by his friend’s side, even as Downey’s life was completely unraveling. When Downey was unable to get something as routine as an insurance bond due to his past troubles with the law, Gibson found him work, casting him in the 2003 film The Singing Detective. The two actors remain close friends today.

In December 2015, California Governor Jerry Brown pardoned Downey for the 1996 drug conviction that sent him to prison for a year.

According to his IMDb profile , Downey is 5 feet, 8 inches inches tall.

According to Celebrity Net Worth , Downey’s total value is around $300 million. Much of his fortune stems from his MCU appearances as Stark. The actor made $75 million from Avengers: Endgame alone thanks to the film’s box office performance.

• I think part of my destiny has to be realizing that I’m not the poster boy for drug abuse. I’m just this guy who has a really strong sense of wanting home and wanting foundation and having not had it, I now choose to create it.
• I don’t drink these days. I am allergic to alcohol and narcotics. I break out in handcuffs.
• Until [“Less Than Zero”], 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... 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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Robert Downey Jr.

IMDbPro Starmeter 97 82

• Contact info
• 78 wins & 152 nominations total

Robert Downey Jr. Through the Years

Photos 1867

• Sherlock Holmes

• TV Mini Series
• Mexican Stranger
• Pre-production

• Lewis Strauss

• Dr. John Dolittle

• Hank Palmer

• executive producer
• In Production

• 16 episodes

• 14 episodes

• co-producer

• In-development projects at IMDbPro

Personal details

• Celewish -Robert Downey Jr's Fans and Brand Engagement Platform
• 5′ 8″ (1.73 m)
• April 4 , 1965
• Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
• Spouses Susan Downey August 27, 2005 - present (2 children)
• Children Indio Falconer Downey
• Parents Robert Downey Sr.
• Allyson Downey (Sibling)
• Other works Recorded "Every Breath You Take" with Sting , and "Chances Are" with Vonda Shepard , both for the "Ally McBeal - Songs of the Heart" soundtrack.
• 2 Print Biographies
• 1 Portrayal
• 11 Interviews
• 29 Articles
• 9 Pictorials
• 140 Magazine Cover Photos

Did you know

• Trivia During the promotion of Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) , famously walked out of an interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy when pressed about his "dark" past because he felt it was inappropriate that children would be watching. He told Howard Stern he would leave again if that ever happened in the future.
• Quotes I've always felt like such an outsider in this industry. Because I'm so insane, I guess.
• Trademarks Sarcastic humorous deliveries while remaining completely stonefaced
• Salaries Oppenheimer ( 2023 ) $4,000,000 + backend participation
• How old is Robert Downey Jr.?
• When was Robert Downey Jr. born?
• Where was Robert Downey Jr. born?

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the true triumph of robert downey jr.’s second act.

in less than two weeks, Robert Downey Jr. is probably going to win an Academy Award. He’s already taken home the Golden Globe and the SAG Award for his portrayal of Lewis Strauss, the man who decides to get revenge on J. Robert Oppenheimer, in Christopher Nolan ’s acclaimed “ Oppenheimer ,” and there seems to be nothing standing in his way to claiming his first Oscar on March 10th. 

For anyone who has been a fan of Downey over the last several decades, his presumed win will be gratifying—a culmination of a career filled with ups and downs. But for those who remember, it may also be a surreal, poignant moment. Not that long ago, such a scene seemed impossible. It is not hyperbole to say that, at one point, many of us were scared that we’d lose one of the most talented actors of his generation. The Oscar will be deeply satisfying, but maybe not as much as the fact that, after so much struggle and scandal, Downey is in a good place. These stories tend to end in tears. His, happily, has not.

It has now been 25 years since Downey was arguably facing the darkest moment of his life. In the summer of 1999, he was sentenced to a three-year prison term, found guilty of drug and weapons possession. The actor’s addiction issues were well-documented by that point, but Downey’s attorney, Robert Shapiro , asked Judge Lawrence Mira for mercy, insisting Downey had changed. Mira was unconvinced , saying, “I don’t believe your client is committed to not using drugs. You may call that addiction. But there is some level of choice. I don’t think we have any alternative [to jail]. We have used them all.” In the courtroom, Downey described his addiction in vivid, harrowing fashion: “It’s like I’ve got a shotgun in my mouth, with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal.”

Downey ended up serving only one year, but it was easy to imagine that the worst was yet to come. Whether before or after that 1999 sentencing, Gen-Xers had gotten accustomed to their heroes dying due to their demons: River Phoenix , Kurt Cobain , Philip Seymour Hoffman . In the early ‘90s, Downey had received a Best Actor nomination for “ Chaplin ,” a star on the rise, but the second half of that decade was littered with arrests and incidents—the kinds of things that make an actor seem like an out-of-control bad boy destined to do permanent harm to himself. You see it enough, and you get used to the patterns. Sadly resigned, you wait for the other shoe to drop.

His dependency issues had roots in his upbringing, just as his interest in acting had. In that courtroom in 1999, Downey said that he’d been addicted to drugs since he was eight. Downey’s father, independent filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., who had his own addiction battles, later admitted to letting his son smoke a joint when the boy was just six: “I knew I had made a terrible, stupid mistake … Giving a little kid a toke of grass just to be funny.”

The younger Downey had appeared in some of his dad’s movies as a kid, but he started garnering the world’s attention thanks to films like “ Weird Science .” And then he was picked for “Saturday Night Live.” Downey and many of his fellow cast members were dismissed after one season. Sometimes, “SNL” makes bad decisions about who gets cut from the show—Downey would be the first to admit his firing was not one of those instances. “I learned so much in that year about what I wasn’t,” he’d say later . “I was not somebody who was going to come up with a catchphrase. I was not somebody who was going to do impressions. I was somebody who was very ill-suited for rapid-fire sketch comedy.” 

Still, Downey found the energy of live comedy exhilarating, adding, “You get a lot of cred just for being able to even participate in that level of real-time stress and excitement.”

By the late 1980s, he was a legitimate star, his good looks and smart-ass demeanor utilized in romantic comedies like “The Pick-up Artist” and “ Chances Are .” (Considering his role in “Oppenheimer,” it’s amusing to point out that Downey played Albert Einstein in the 1989 mockumentary “That’s Adequate.”) But the most pivotal movie was “ Less Than Zero ,” an adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel that saw him play Julian, a drug addict in a downward spiral. His performance was gripping, but Downey all-too-closely identified with the character. 

“Until that movie, I took my drugs after work and on the weekends,” he’d say later . “Maybe I’d turn up hungover on the set, but no more so than the stuntman. That changed on ‘Less Than Zero.’ … [T]he 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.”

Downey’s career continued to blossom in the 1990s: Beyond “Chaplin,” he was superb in Robert Altman ’s ensemble piece “ Short Cuts ” and suitably unhinged in Oliver Stone ’s combustible “ Natural Born Killers .” On screen, he seemed willing to do anything—not bug-eyed crazed like Nicolas Cage but rippling with immediacy and unpredictability—but his drug use was increasingly becoming an issue. Sarah Jessica Parker , whose seven-year relationship with the actor ended in 1991, later admitted of their time together , “It taught me how I love and what’s the difference between loving and taking care of people and what’s necessary and what grown-ups should and shouldn’t do for one [another]. And maybe it taught me a little bit about being a parent, too, because … the way I cared for Downey were things that might be more suitable for a parent.” 

It wasn’t just girlfriends who were concerned: In an interview with Oprah Winfrey , Downey recalled working on 1995’s “Home for the Holidays,” director Jodie Foster taking him aside and saying, “You know you’re doing great on this film, and I know that you’re loaded, too. … I’m worried about you. Not on this one, because we’re almost done and you’re going to be okay, and I know you have a really strong work ethic and you’re kind of like a lab rat. You’re really resilient. That’s not a good thing in this situation. I’m worried about you for the next movie.”

Foster’s worries were well-founded. The following year was a period in which Downey kept getting in trouble with the law. Arrested three times in the summer of 1996, he was busted for (among other things) possession of cocaine and heroin. The frequency of his arrests quickly eviscerated his reputation, leaving former reps fearing the worst. Loree Rodkin, his one-time manager, told People that summer, “Every day I look in the newspaper, and I think that I am going to read Robert’s obituary.” 

In 1997, he was sentenced to six months in prison because of a violation of his probation. (In the interim, he’d made headlines a few more times, including being arrested on a narcotics charge after he’d broken into a neighbor’s house and fallen asleep in a child’s bedroom.) The judge who sentenced Downey to the six-month term was Mira, who you may remember ruled a few years later that the actor go to prison for three years. Mira had watched Downey try and fail to turn his life around: Back in 1997, he told Downey , “I’m going to incarcerate you, and I’m going to incarcerate you in a way that’s very unpleasant for you. I don’t care who you are. What I care about is that there is a life to be saved from drugs.” 

Downey was apologetic then as well, saying, “I don’t know why … the severity and the fear … of you, of death and of not being able to live a life free of drugs has not been enough to make me not continually relapse … again. I really need to do this, even if I don’t want to, I need to.”

Getting released early from prison after the 1999 sentencing didn’t do any good: He was arrested twice in the next year, leading to him being sent to a rehab facility. (It had not been Downey’s first such visit.) Around the same time, he won a Golden Globe after being cast on “Ally McBeal,” but he said in 2003 , “I’m probably not the best person to ask about that period. It was my lowest point in terms of addictions. At that stage, I didn’t give a fuck whether I ever acted again.” And yet, there were great performances: He’s funny in “ Bowfinger ” and “ Wonder Boys ,” and there are those who think the 2003 cult classic “ The Singing Detective ” is the best thing he’s ever done. 

But that was also the year he finally got serious about getting sober. His second wife, Susan, whom he met when she produced his film “ Gothika ,” gave him (in Downey’s words) an “ultimatum,” which started him down the road to staying clean. In his Winfrey interview, Downey admitted, “You think [overcoming addiction is] supposed to get more and more dramatic, it’s not a movie. It’s real life. For me, I just happened to be in a situation the very last time and I said, ‘You know what? I don’t think I can continue doing this.’ And I reached out for help and I ran with it, you know? … It’s really not that difficult to overcome these seemingly ghastly problems. … What’s hard is to decide.”

I’m lucky never to have dealt with addiction, or to have anyone close to me who has, so I can’t pretend to know how complicated sobriety can be. But even so, I imagine it was much more challenging than Downey lets on. What’s undeniable is that, since getting sober in 2003, his career rebounded, even reached new heights. Whether it’s the R-rated crime comedy “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” or his role in the stirring drama “ Good Night, and Good Luck ,” he suddenly conveyed a weightier presence than he’d shown in his younger years. His turn as “Zodiac’s” haunted investigative reporter Paul Avery is arguably his finest hour — Downey’s trademark sardonic humor mixing with something far bleaker and emotional — and he’s a hoot in “A Scanner Darkly,” tapping into that dark comedy’s paranoid vibe. 

But no movie of that era—not even “ Tropic Thunder ,” which earned him his second Oscar nomination and spurred ongoing debate about whether his satiric blackface performance was inappropriate—defined his comeback more than 2008’s “ Iron Man .” Released the same summer as Nolan’s “ The Dark Knight ,” the other comic-book movie that changed the industry, “Iron Man” was no sure thing, with Downey (not that far removed from his legal issues) hardly an A-list superstar. But director Jon Favreau stuck by him, and the two men helped make the Marvel Cinematic Universe the biggest thing in Hollywood. There was a period when Downey was practically unemployable. ( Mel Gibson , his “Air America” co-star, put up the money to help insure Downey for “The Singing Detective,” a favor that—no matter Gibson’s many abhorrent acts—has kept Downey forever grateful to his friend .) But now, all of a sudden, Downey was cinema’s most important star.

Flash-forwarding to today, when superhero fatigue is starting to feel permanent, it can be hard to appreciate how meaningful Downey was to the MCU. Ironically, years earlier, “SNL” had hired him and others in the hopes that established actors would help revitalize the struggling show—in a sense, that’s what Downey actually did for Marvel, giving it an instant legitimacy. When other Oscar nominees (like Mark Ruffalo ) or respected indie stars (such as Scarlett Johansson ) started signing up for the MCU, it wasn’t so shocking. Alongside Nolan’s Batman films, which had earned Heath Ledger a posthumous Oscar, the Marvel films sought the best actors in the world to sell the drama within the blockbuster spectacle. 

But other actors came and went in superhero movies. Some, like Chris Evans , openly lamented the demands of stardom. Not Downey: From “Iron Man” to his heroic death in 2019’s “ Avengers: Endgame ,” he was front and center. At MCU premieres, he always spoke last. He was the team captain. It wasn’t simply Tony Stark’s death that irrevocably changed the franchise’s future—it was the fact that Robert Downey Jr. wasn’t part of the MCU anymore that made the difference. Those movies’ heart—their upstart energy—was gone. Five years later, Kevin Feige is still trying to find a worthy replacement. 

Since exiting the MCU, Downey has kept working, never badmouthing the Iron Man years but also wanting to create a little distance. As he once put it , “I am not my work. I am not what I did with that studio. I am not that period of time that I spent playing this character.” Some of those post-Marvel projects have been disastrous—even on a bet, avoid “ Dolittle ”—but others were clearly personal. 

Working with prolific documentarian Chris Smith (“ American Movie ,” “ Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond ”), Downey decided to make a tribute to his father. “Sr.” chronicled Robert Downey Sr.’s filmmaking career, but its most affecting moments came from the two men simply talking, the son asking his dad about his life. There’s no grand catharsis—no moment of riveting candor in which they tearfully hash out their shared battles with addiction—but it’s clear that part of their bond was formed by what Sr. had introduced into Jr.’s world by giving him that joint so long ago. Downey Sr., who has Parkinson’s in the film, died in 2021, more than a year before the documentary’s release, and “Sr.” feels like a melancholy farewell to a father from his boy, who struggled as much as the old man with demons. But it also feels like the closing of a chapter for Downey, with a new one about to be written.

“Oppenheimer” was the first movie Downey made after his dad’s passing , his connection to some of the film’s New Mexico locations stemming from spending time there with his dad when he was a teenager . After working on the documentary and taking an acting hiatus , Downey got back in front of the camera to play a man so unlike himself—or, at least, the men he usually portrays. Strauss is deeply insecure and petty, his arrogance belying his smallness. Lacking any sense of humor, Strauss is the villain, the Salieri trying to take down his personal Mozart. Where Downey’s characters tend to be highly verbal, almost hyperactive, Strauss was hushed, unanimated. Tony Stark was triumphant—Lewis Strauss is humiliated in the most public fashion imaginable. Robert Downey Jr. returned to cinemas, but he wasn’t the man we remembered.

As awards talk has focused on Downey over these last few months, it was easy to see why he’d be a front-runner. After years making superhero films, the once-rising actor’s actor had refocused his talents on serious drama. But anyone who’s loved Downey knows the comeback narrative goes much further back—and is far more fraught. 

I distinctly remember his “gun metal” line in 1999, mentally making peace back then with the fact that he might not be with us much longer. Movie stars aren’t our friends, but if we watch them long enough on the big screen, we feel like we know them. And they can break our hearts. A decade later, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death still bothers me—the tragedy of it, the senselessness of it, the power of addiction, the incalculable loss. Downey seemed fated to go down the same path. 

When stars die too young, we lament what could have been—what incredible performances they might have gifted us with. Assuming Downey does win the Oscar, it will be the capper on a happy ending that is not, in fact, over. We don’t have to wonder what Downey might have done if he’d gotten sober. He has, and we have his terrific turn in “Oppenheimer” as a result. We’re living in a future we’d not dared to believe was possible.

Tim Grierson

Tim Grierson is the Senior U.S. Critic for  Screen International . 

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Robert Downey Jr.’s Third Act: “He’s Lived a Complicated Life. He Understands the Stakes”

By Anthony Breznican

“Okay, last question...”

That’s usually the very first thing Robert Downey Jr. says when he sits down to start a conversation. Obviously, it’s a joke. He’s messing with you a little, but that’s what you want—the high-octane movie star firing on all cylinders, delivering that devilish charm that made Iron Man as legendary as Superman. He wants to play. But it’s also a reminder to keep up, to stay alert, and remember that this—whatever this is, our time together—is fleeting. Talk to him for any length of time and it’s clear that Downey, who grew up on camera and is now 58, is acutely aware of a ticking clock. There’s a countdown happening at all times behind those eyes. In interview after interview over the years, he has often returned to a similar fatalistic theme: Make the most of now, because the end is closer than you think. It’s definitely coming someday. Maybe soon. Who knows?

“I don’t think he operates with that hanging over him, but I do think this is a period of time where he has been very reflective, and it is something that he often references: ‘Well, I’m in the back nine,’ ” says his wife, producer Susan Downey. The couple met more than two decades ago when both were working on the 2003 horror film Gothika and married in 2005, the same year their next collaboration, the neo-noir Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, came out. Now they run the production company Team Downey, and she is intensely involved in every decision he makes, including when to take a chance and when to hold back. “He is very conscious,” she says, “of a beginning, middle, and end to telling stories”—including his own. “And he is also very conscious of not wanting to overstay a welcome, knowing when to get out before it’s too late and you regret that you didn’t.”

The hands of that ticking clock have now carried him back to a place he first found himself 30 years ago: in Oscar contention for a transformative performance. Back then it was for the lead role in 1992’s Chaplin, an alternately tender and searing portrait of the silent-film star. His next nomination came 16 years and several comebacks later, for a blistering send-up of his own profession in the 2008 Hollywood satire Tropic Thunder.

Today, Downey’s in the awards race for another metamorphosis, breathing both grandiosity and insecurity into career bureaucrat Lewis Strauss in Christopher Nolan’s nuclear-age historical drama Oppenheimer. Strauss is such a prominent antagonist that he literally changes the color of the film, with Downey anchoring black-and-white segments that capture Strauss’s postwar efforts to discredit Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic lead scientist behind the US atomic bomb program. It’s Downey’s first big screen role in three years and a model for where he is headed next—away from the sarcasm and superheroics of Tony Stark and into a more intimate, vulnerable next chapter.

For years now, Downey has been deluged with offers to play variations on Stark, and he has deflected them all. “We get tons of stuff that riff off of that. ‘Oh, he’s the smartest guy in the room,’ and ‘He’s the fast talker.’ All that kind of stuff,” Susan says. Downey himself has been ambivalent about how much he actually resembles the superhero who changed his life. “I ain’t him, I’ll tell you that flat out,” he told me when I asked him directly in 2018, on the set of Avengers: Endgame. “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 fucking 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.”

But that sense of darkness, of a past that can’t be escaped, is also part of Strauss, who is less like Stark than the kind of bureaucratic fussbudget who might turn up as an irksome apparatchik in a Marvel movie. As Susan puts it, “I think what was incredible is that Chris saw in Robert what he could be if you took all of his tools away, all the wonderful things that are very charming, very charismatic, and looked for the stillness.”

That’s how Nolan hooked him—not by making it easy, but by promising it would be hard. “Let me put it this way: I didn’t see any of Lewis Strauss in Robert Downey Jr.—at all,” says Nolan. “I didn’t know him but I’d met him a couple of times, and looking at him from the outside, I felt like he just was in a place where he would be ready to come and try something completely different. And as a director, if you can convince one of the great actors of his generation to come and challenge himself in a completely different way, you just know you’re going to get something special.”

For this story, of course, there is no “last question”—or first question, even. Downey couldn’t participate because, like all members of the Screen Actors Guild, he was on strike until our deadline had passed. But Susan, who says that in the course of their marriage she has learned to “speak Downey,” watched his immersion into the massive ensemble of Oppenheimer in real time. “He loves when something has this grand execution,” she says. “What he really likes is that tight-knit group of people who are making the decisions and creating the piece.”

That was the appeal of making Oppenheimer with Nolan and his producing partner Emma Thomas, who, like the Downeys, are another husband-and-wife filmmaking duo prone to taking big swings. “For him, Chris and Emma have just figured that out like nobody else,” Susan says.

Even their process for casting has a no-nonsense streamline to it. “When you’re doing a Chris Nolan thing, basically you get a phone call: ‘Chris wants you for this. Will you come read the script at his house?’ ” says Susan, who joked that her husband’s curiosity clashed with his, let’s say, more inert tendencies. “Robert’s like, ‘Wait, I have to drive that far east ?… Okay.’ Once he was willing to do that, I already knew his mindset was very open.”

The Oppenheimer team was surprised to meet a movie star who was willing to cast off his armor. “Honestly, he kind of subverted all my expectations of him,” Thomas says. “We’ve often talked about how amazing it’d be to work with him, but we work in a very specific, fairly stripped-down way. I wasn’t sure how he was going to adjust to that way of working because, when you’re a big movie star like Robert, that isn’t necessarily the way you’re used to working.”

But his Avengers experience had also prepared him for being part of Oppenheimer ’s gargantuan ensemble, one of 79 speaking roles in a cast that includes three best actor Oscar winners. Downey’s Strauss clashes repeatedly with Murphy’s Oppenheimer but also with his own aide (played by Alden Ehrenreich) and even with Albert Einstein (Tom Conti). Fueled by a potent mix of sincere conviction and petty grievance, he commands scene after scene of crowded public hearings, strategy sessions, and backroom machinations, but without the bemused pizzazz of his Marvel alter ego. Strauss may be a politically savvy survivor, but he’s also a black hole of personality who doesn’t so much fill a room as draw everyone into his own.

As he had on his Marvel films, Downey relished the opportunity to stray from best-laid plans, carefully mapping out a scene with filmmakers and crew only to go rogue. “From a creative point of view, he came extraordinarily well prepared,” Nolan says. “It’s a very complicated part, and he had it absolutely down. And he also had a number of, I wouldn’t call them improvisations because a lot of it was very carefully planned, but he had a number of embellishments, things that he wanted to bring to the character, things that he wanted to try out.”

Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema would follow Downey in a room as he delivered monologues that stretched multiple pages.

“I think he loved that freedom to move around the room and present himself with whatever energy he felt like: ‘Let’s try it again! Let’s try it a different way!’ ” Nolan says. “However heavy the 70-millimeter camera was, Hoyte would never get too tired. In a way, Robert was probably waiting for him to get tired, but he didn’t. So he was able to really thrash it out, really reach for something and stretch himself.”

Joe and Anthony Russo, who directed Downey in three Marvel movies, describe the Downey method in similar terms: “When he’ll come back to set, Robert is famous for throwing the plan out the window and climbing on top of the couch and whatever, sort of going off-book,” Joe says. “He does this because he likes to surprise himself. He likes to keep things fresh. He lights up for that.”

“There’s no other way that he could have played that character for 10 movies unless he was doing that,” Anthony adds. “Robert has certainly lived a complicated life. He understands the stakes, he understands loss, he understands the turns life can take between ups and downs. He’s always looking for that level of depth, that level of complexity. I think he knows that’s what we all come to movies for in the first place.”

Downey has been around so long, it’s almost hard to comprehend how far back he started—first as a child actor in his father Robert Downey Sr.’s offbeat indie films, then as smarmy sidekicks in ’80s flicks Tuff Turf, Weird Science, and Back to School. When filmmakers amplified his natural magnetism, he became a Brat Pack heartthrob, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic. In the agonizing 1987 addiction saga Less Than Zero, he plays a young man who is both endearing and self-destructive—much as Downey himself was at the time. Director Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin was regarded as a revelation, with the then 27-year-old vanishing into a soulful performance that spanned decades in Charlie Chaplin’s life. It was a turning point for Downey, but then came the turn downward.

Susan met him when he was pre-Marvel but post-meltdown. In the late 1990s, a lifetime of drug-fueled rambunctiousness overpowered him and landed the actor repeatedly in rehab and behind bars. Fortunately for Downey, rooting for the underdog was still fashionable in those pre–social media times. He won “comeback” roles, including a love interest in season four of Ally McBeal in 2000, only to be written off after his next drug-induced arrest. For a while, it seemed his demons might cost him his life, but then he got help and got clean. You couldn’t call it a second chance—he’d already blown through more than two of those. It was more like a second act, and Downey didn’t waste it. As he spent years rebuilding his life, he became a source of inspiration to others struggling with addiction. And he staged an epic professional resurgence as Iron Man, despite some industry resistance to the risk of welcoming him back at all.

In the Netflix documentary Sr., which chronicled the final years in the life of his acerbic indie filmmaker father, Robert Downey, the actor acknowledged that moviemaking is one way his family taught him to process life. “Whatever’s unfolding, funny or tragic, it’s happening with a 16-millimeter camera going, and we can reflect on it,” he tells his therapist in the film. “But then there’s some part of me that feels like, I’ll….” And there his voice breaks: “I’ll miss something.”

And that’s the challenge Downey is facing in his third reel: Don’t miss out. Don’t be idle. Don’t sit on the status he has achieved, the resources he has amassed, or the goodwill he has generated with both colleagues and the public. Lately, he has met the challenge to live twice as hard by splitting himself in two. In a pair of recent documentary projects, Sr. and the Max streaming series Downey’s Dream Cars, he is opening up about his true self and private life in a way that’s not just intimate but shockingly raw at times. Meanwhile, his acting has steered him in new directions entirely. Oppenheimer is just the first step. The next is playing four different oddball figures in the upcoming Park Chan-wook–directed espionage series The Sympathizer.

He and Susan executive-produced that show for HBO, based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2015 novel about a North Vietnamese spy undercover in the United States in the 1970s. As with Oppenheimer, Downey disappears into his role—or, in this case, roles. “Each of his characters is a white male who has found great success in American society in a variety of fields,” Park says. “You can say having a colonialist side is something they share. They are not typical saints or villains but complicated people with both virtues and flaws.”

Downey asked Park how unrecognizable he should be in each part. “I answered that I wanted the audience to be well aware a single actor is playing multiple roles—but to forget this as they become immersed in the story,” the director says. “To accomplish this, each character must have strong idiosyncrasies but remain within the realm of realism. For the audience to understand the concept that these characters are the various faces of the American ruling class, they must sense the fact it’s one actor playing them all.”

It seems staggering to consider now, but Downey was nearly passed over for the role of Iron Man. Executives at Marvel Entertainment didn’t want soon-to-be Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and Iron Man director Jon Favreau to cast him. “It purely came down to the Marvel board being nervous at putting all of their chips in their future films on somebody who famously had those legal troubles in the past,” Feige says. “I wasn’t very good—and I’m still not great—at taking no for an answer. But I also don’t pound my chest to try to get my way. I try to figure out ways to make it as clear to other people why we should head in a direction. And that’s when the idea of a screen test came up.”

Fourteen years removed from that Oscar-nominated Chaplin performance, Downey was required to put ego aside and show up on September 25, 2006, to film his audition. The execs finally conceded that Feige and Favreau were right, an assessment that has since been proven correct several billion times over. Feige remembers Downey as an essential team player who nourished a collegial atmosphere between himself and the rest of the superhero squad, becoming—in every sense of the phrase—a supporting actor. In 2013, as the first Avengers sequel went into production, he even made headlines in the Hollywood trades for using his own contract negotiations with Marvel to leverage for higher pay for his costars.

“We used to joke and say that Robert was the head of the acting department because everybody there looked up to him,” Feige says. “He took them all under his wing, but not in a subservient sense. He just became their cheerleader.” One day on the set of the first Avengers, I overheard Downey advising Chris Hemsworth about ways to manage his tax liability while filming overseas, offering to set him up with “The Missus,” Susan, to go over specifics. He was forever doing things like that—and still does.

“I even saw it at Chris Evans’s wedding,” says Susan, who joined her husband at the Captain America actor’s nuptials to Alba Baptista in September. “Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth were talking to Robert,” she says. “I was like, Oh right, he is the guy who is…I don’t want to say a mentor, but I just see him as the dude who knows a lot. He’s been through a lot of scenarios, both in life and in work, and has survived a lot.” She says she was drawn to him for the same reason. “All of the stuff that made him wonderful and weird when I met him, and made him someone unlike anyone I’ve ever known, is still who he is today.”

After 10 films, Downey’s Iron Man made his exit in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, still a high-water mark for the series. Marvel has a reputation for resurrecting characters who seemingly meet their ends, but Feige says that won’t happen to Stark. “We are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again,” Feige says. “We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way.”

Downey was reluctant even to do reshoots and redo a single line of dialogue, Stark’s last, for Endgame. “We’d already said tearful goodbyes on the last day of shooting. Everybody had moved on emotionally,” Joe Russo says. “We promised him it would be the last time we made him do it—ever.”

“That was a difficult thing for him to do, to come back to pick up that line,” Anthony Russo adds. “When he did come back, we were shooting on a stage directly opposite where he auditioned for Tony Stark. So his last line as Tony Stark was shot literally a couple hundred feet from his original audition that got him the role.”

As he was wrapping up the character, Downey was also looking back, recalling the early days of making the first movie at Edwards Air Force Base in the desert of California. Iron Man director Favreau had fought for him. Downey has always felt the responsibility ever since to pay that forward. “In my quiet moments of reverie, I remember being in the high desert…I think for my birthday and also maybe it was Passover? April 2007,” Downey told me in 2018. “I remember it all feeling very much like a significant time in the art and life of Jon. I go back to the belief that he had in me—and the belief that he gave me in myself.”

In the movies, second acts seldom end on an uplifting note. That’s usually when things are darkest and most desperate for the protagonist. Four years after concluding Stark’s similarly redemptive story arc in Avengers: Endgame, Downey is…doing pretty well, actually. The fortune he earned as the flagship hero of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is enough to cushion him for several lifetimes, though he’s too restless for that. “He’s a lot more fun to live with when he has a call sheet,” his wife says.

What he wants now is what both The Avengers and Oppenheimer gave him—the chance to spar, to play, and measure up to fellow actors who test his talents. His wife describes watching TV shows and movies with him: “He watches it like a sporting event,” she says. “He’s so excited for what someone just pulled off or the degree of difficulty that he recognizes. Like, ‘Oh, my God, they shot that at night. That was probably really cold. He had to go do this physicality, give this speech, turn around, do this emotional beat….’ He’ll break it down in a way that you just see: This is somebody who respects that it’s hard.”

Downey is a genuine fan. During the making of The Judge, in 2013, he would crouch behind the monitors and wax rhapsodic about the acting chops of Vincent D’Onofrio, Jeremy Strong, and Robert Duvall during a sequence he wasn’t even in. “When he sees things he admires, he really likes to look at that, examine it, and let people know,” Susan says. She means that last part literally. “He gets excited and wants to reach out. For example, two episodes into Mr. Robot he was needing to speak to Rami Malek,” who turned out to be his eventual Oppenheimer costar. “He knew of Chris Abbott, but after seeing On the Count of Three, he had to reach out to him and to Jerrod Carmichael,” Susan says. And as for Ehrenreich, who shares all of his Oppenheimer scenes with Downey, he “can be guaranteed a FaceTime a week whether he likes it or not.”

For three years after his Marvel run ended, Downey said yes to almost nothing. (“When I’m done with this, if you hear I’m not taking a break, call me and tell me I’m crazy,” he told me as Endgame was finishing.) Then, with Oppenheimer, came something he couldn’t resist—the chance to disappear.

“I knew that he was capable of complete naturalism, of completely stripping away some of that charm, some of that persona, and losing himself in a real character,” Nolan says. “I could tell he was up for that. He was up for being challenged.” Susan remembers the first thing to go was her husband’s vanity. “Chris doesn’t really do prosthetics, and he didn’t want to do wigs and those kinds of things. They were doing some of the tests for it, I believe, and I just remember Robert came home and he was like, ‘Yep, we decided we just need to shave it.’ He created this balding head,” she says. Then she began to worry he was going too far. “He was losing weight for the role. I was looking at pictures, saying ‘I don’t think that Lewis Strauss is a really skinny, skinny guy.’ Then I saw the movie for the first time—and I’d lived with him through it, I’d seen some stills, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I get it now.’ ”

Nolan’s favorite moment of Downey’s performance came at the end of one of those long days, when a defiant Strauss finally reckons with his impending downfall. “There’s just a little moment where he just brings his hand up to his neck and it’s a handheld close-up. In that gesture, you just see into this guy’s soul. You just don’t see actors giving you access to somebody’s raw humanity in that way. And it’s such a tiny little moment. Every time it just gets me,” Nolan says. “It’s a later take in a very long series of takes. He had been through a massive emotional roller coaster every time. And so it’s the natural result of that. You feel sorry for him—in a way that you’re not meant to at all, but you do because you’re seeing somebody who’s humiliated themselves.”

Thomas recalled hosting early test screenings for trusted friends and colleagues during the editing process. Some of them didn’t recognize one of the most recognizable actors on the planet. “We had a number of people watch the film not realizing that it was Robert,” she says. “It really speaks to the transformation, the fact that he really lived that character.”

Living is the key. The “back nine” eventually plays out. Every third act has an ending. The challenge is to make it a satisfying one.

The Downeys like to take long beach walks, where they brainstorm and map out the possibilities ahead. A cascade of personal losses in recent years—Susan’s father, lost to Parkinson’s disease in 2020; Robert’s own father, who succumbed to the same illness a year later; and Downey’s close friend and personal assistant Jimmy Rich, who died in a car accident in 2021—can’t help but weigh on such conversations. The ticking clock becomes ever harder to ignore. “You do say, ‘Okay, well, we only have so many years ahead of us, and so many movies ahead of us, or time with our kids,’ ” Susan says. (They share two children, and Downey has an adult son from a previous marriage.) “I do think you become more intentional.”

Downey has spent his life figuring out ways to be himself, to resist things that distort or distract that reality, while finding perhaps the healthiest way to escape his own head—immersing himself in playing somebody else. With Oppenheimer in his rearview, The Sympathizer finished and awaiting release next year, and everything on hold and in flux as Hollywood grapples with its labor conflict, the future is unclear for the actor. What’s next? That’s the question.

It’s not the last question. Not yet. Downey’s third act has already begun, but where it goes from here is still in development.

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‘Fifteen years of total insanity’: how Robert Downey Jr made peace with his maverick father

Robert Downey Sr put his son in wild underground movies and gave him access to drugs. So what happened when Downey Jr finally turned the cameras on his dad?

I n his father’s underground western Greaser’s Palace, a seven-year-old Robert Downey Jr plays, in his own words, “a boy who got his neck slit by God”. This, perhaps, explains a lot. Downey Jr grew up on Robert Downey Sr’s film sets in the 70s and 80s, amid what he calls “a cacophony of creativity”, at the heart of the counterculture cinema scene fuelled by “cigarettes and weed and booze”. He slept in a cot wedged against an editing desk, got taken to see X-rated films such as La Grande Bouffe at an absurdly young age, and went on a cross-country road trip as a kid where he “was in charge of the hash pipe”.

In the twilight of his father’s years, Downey Jr wanted some answers about why his father didn’t take better care of him. The resulting documentary – called Sr, with remorseless family logic – acts as part tribute, part therapy session and part last hurrah. “You,” Downey Jr tells his father, “did not give a mad fuck, did you?”

The elephant in the room of Sr is Downey’s turbulent period as a cocaine- and heroin-dependent young movie star (before he miraculously cleaned up his act to become at one point the world’s highest paid actor ), and the extent to which Downey Sr may or may not be responsible for his son’s addictions. In fact, it’s the elephant in the room until it isn’t. Fifty-five minutes into Sr, Downey Jr, who spends a good part of the film gently grilling his ailing father over Zoom, addresses it directly: “I think we would be remiss not to discuss its effect on me.” Downey Sr, in his 80s and beginning to succumb to Parkinson’s, readily admits that the time he spent in Los Angeles in the 1980s as a heavy-duty cocaine addict himself was “15 years of total fucking insanity”, but he isn’t too keen to get into it again. “Boy, I could sure love to miss that discussion,” he mutters.

But no matter: we cut to an interview clip that looks like it was shot in the 90s, in which Downey Sr takes it on the chin. “A lot of us thought it would be hypocritical to not have our kids participate in marijuana and stuff like that,” he says. “It was an idiot move on our parts to share that with our children. I’m just happy he’s here.” Downey Jr is in shot too, and frankly doesn’t look well. The interviewer asks: “Were you ever worried he wasn’t going to be here?” With forthright honesty Downey Sr replies: “Many times.”

Over 30 years later, the situation is very different. Downey Sr is no longer with us; he died during the making of the documentary . Downey Jr is secure in his position in the Hollywood firmament, and now seemingly anxious to draw attention to his father’s film-making achievements. Downey Sr carved his path in the underground in the 60s and 70s with chaotic absurdist abandon. He made extravagantly berserk films such as the aforementioned Greaser’s Palace, in which a pink-hatted Jesus surrogate parachutes into the old west; the plot-free comedy Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight; and probably his best known film, the Black-Power-meets-Madison-Ave satire Putney Swope , released in 1969. Another of Downey Sr’s films, Pound, in which human actors play dogs waiting to be put down, features Downey Jr’s very first screen performances, as a five-year-old.

Arguably Downey Sr’s biggest fan is film director Paul Thomas Anderson , who cast him in a small role as a recording studio guy in Boogie Nights, and of whom Downey Jr says, only a little sarcastically: “It’s no mystery that Paul Thomas Anderson is probably the son my dad wishes he had had.”

By the time Sr (the film) came to be, Downey Sr’s active film-making career was well in the past. His most recent credit was a 2005 documentary about Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square. But Sr shows, if nothing else, that the man had an unquenchable yen to direct, to the extent that he took the opportunity to commandeer Sr’s equipment and crew to shoot his own version of the same film. Sr’s actual director, Chris Smith, is known for filming tricksy subjects with their own agendas, in films such as Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened , about the disastrous festival, and Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond , in which Jim Carrey method acted as Andy Kaufman. Smith generously incorporated elements of “the Senior cut” into the finished film, and in fact says that letting Downey Sr run with it made sense for everyone. “Had he not started doing his own version, it would have been a nightmare. He would have been all over us. It kept me outside of the crosshairs, so to speak.”

Smith’s co-cinematographer and editor Kevin Ford set up an edit suite in Downey Sr’s front room – and as he became more unwell, his bedroom. His allusive, eccentric directing style is readily apparent in the way he outlines what sequences he wants filmed. In contrast to what Downey Jr calls the “legitimate” documentary he is making, Downey Sr appears to be creating an impressionistic memoir, threading together meaningful memories and chance, unrepeatable improvisations. So he takes the camera crew to the Greenwich Village address where the family lived in a converted loft (now demolished and replaced with a Nutella cafe), and has Downey Jr leap out from behind a tree and sing the same Schubert lieder he performed as a 15-year-old in a talent contest. He visits an alleyway near the Bowery where, back in the 6os, he paid a hobo $50 to lie down for a memorable dance scene in Putney Swope . A random guy doing pull-ups on scaffolding or a bunch of mopeds bombing down a boardwalk are just as much grist to the mill.

Smith, an otherwise fairly laconic individual, says it was inspiring to watch Downey Sr at work. “It was very inventive, it was very loose.” But he adds that there was “a different set of criteria” at play. “[Downey Sr] said we would be unsuccessful if half the audience doesn’t walk out of the film.” And Smith remembers the interview they shot with actor Alan Arkin . “At one point in the interview, Alan gets up and says, ‘I want to go grab a kumquat.’ He walks over and he grabs one and comes back. In the Senior cut, that was the only piece used from that whole interview.”

Smith evidently didn’t entirely share Downey Sr’s perspective: there’s no kumquat shot in the “legitimate” version, and quite a few of Arkin’s affectionately waspish comments are kept in. (“I don’t know how he came up with his casting ideas … it was like he went down the Bowery half the time and just picked up people who were half in the bag.”) Smith says discussions are ongoing as to whether the full Senior cut will actually see the light of day.

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In piecing together the varied strands, Smith faced a complex task: dipping in and out of the Senior cut as well as accommodating the father-son Zoom sessions, Downey Jr’s to-camera observations, archive clips of Downey Sr’s old films, and so on. “We wanted to embrace Senior’s looseness and his spirit. But also try to make something that functioned as a movie.” Smith says Downey Jr was initially very resistant to the film being about him … but then “things evolved and changed”. Partly due to the still-complex relationship between father and son, with much apparently needing to be said, and partly due to Downey Sr’s advancing Parkinson’s. “It sort of morphed into this film about fathers and sons and a meditation on life in general.”

For Downey Jr, there’s undoubtedly a therapeutic dimension to the documentary. In fact, we even listen in on a session he has with his therapist in which they discuss his father’s impending demise. For Downey Sr we can’t be so certain, but his wife, author Rosemary Rogers, says in the documentary that working on it “was energising and exciting” for him. “With Parkinson’s you lose a little bit of something every day, but he’s fully focused on the film. It’s everything for him.” Smith says Downey Jr was very trusting and, while Downey Jr and his wife, film executive Susan Downey, acted as producers on the project, he had little interference. “I took notes from them, for sure, but believe me, if there were issues I’d tell you.”

Downey Sr died in July 2021, shortly after finishing his cut. Downey Jr filmed a final interaction with him and his own son, Exton. Smith also got to incorporate a little of the informal tribute the Downey family held for the late patriarch. Downey Jr has his documentary/memorial, and Smith is grateful to have been in the right place at the right time. “I think everyone just felt happy and blessed and fortunate that we were able to preserve and capture a little bit of the life force that surrounded this person. I think that was such a gift. We were just lucky to be there at the right time.”

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Robert Downey Jr.

Robert John Downey Jr. (born April 4, 1965) is an American actor and producer. Downey made his screen debut in 1970, at the age of five, when he appeared in his father's film Pound, and has worked consistently in film and television ever since. He received two Academy Award nominations for his roles in films Chaplin (1992) and Tropic Thunder (2008).

Downey Jr. is most known for his role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Tony Stark/Iron Man. He has appeared as the character in Iron Man (2008), The Incredible Hulk (2008), Iron Man 2 (2010), The Avengers (2012), Iron Man 3 (2013), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), and Avengers: Endgame (2019). The character is the most notable in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and helped transcend the franchise into the goliath that it is today.

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The career of Robert Downey Jr: Early roles, superhero blockbusters, an Oscar win and more

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Robert Downey Jr. is widely known for his role in the Marvel franchise , but his long career includes much more than Iron Man alone.

Downey Jr. grew up in a Hollywood family, with his writer-director father, the late Robert Downey Sr. , and actress mother, the late Elsie Downey.

He was introduced to the film industry very early. His first role was in the movie "Pound" at just 5 years old. The movie was written and directed by his father.

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In the early years of his career, Downey Jr. was a cast member on "Saturday Night Live" from 1985 to 1986. He starred in films like "Back to School" (1986), "The Pick-up Artist" (1987) and "Less Than Zero" (1987).

In 1992, Downey Jr. was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in the film "Chaplin." After that, the offers rolled in and he appeared in movies including "Only You" (1994), "Richard III" (1995), "One Night Stand" (1997) and "In Dreams" (1999).

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In 1997, Downey Jr. went from the big screen to TV with his role in the television series "Ally McBeal."

Other movies Downey Jr. was in around this time include "The Singing Detective" (2003), "Gothika" (2003), "A Scanner Darkly" (2006) and "Zodiac" (2007).

In 2008, Downey Jr. found extraordinary success as Iron Man in the Marvel franchise . There are three standalone films featuring the hero. The first two movies were directed by Jon Favreau, who also stars in the films. The third was directed by Shane Black.

Iron Man is also a hero in other Marvel movies, including the "Avengers" series.

The four "Avengers" movies – "The Avengers" (2012), "Avengers: Age of Ultron" (2015), "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018) and "Avengers: Endgame" (2019) – also star Chris Evans as Captain America, Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye, Mark Ruffalo as Hulk, Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff.

The same year the first "Iron Man" movie was released, Downey Jr. starred in "Tropic Thunder" with Ben Stiller and Jack Black. Downey Jr. was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in the film.

In between his time playing a superhero, he was in many other movies, such as "Sherlock Holmes" (2009) and "Due Date" (2010).

More recently, Downey Jr. executive produced the documentary "Sr." about his late father and starred in the 2023 blockbuster movie "Oppenheimer" with Cillian Murphy, Florence Pugh, Emily Blunt and Matt Damon. Downey Jr. won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this role.

Original article source: The career of Robert Downey Jr: Early roles, superhero blockbusters, an Oscar win and more

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Robert Downey Jr. Doesn’t See Things the Way You Do

He helped launch the Marvel universe (would he wear the suit again??). He finally won his Oscar. But even in the small moments, he’s always on the verge of a new revelation.

Where were Winnifred and Willow? Last night he came downstairs around bedtime and didn’t see either of them. This alarmed him. He wasn’t worried about Monty—Monty’s an old cat, shows up when he pleases. But the two rescue kittens aren’t as worldly as Monty is, and there are hawks here in Malibu, which is why last year Robert Downey Jr. hired the host of the television show My Cat from Hell to come and rig up all kinds of gates, tents, fences, and special cat doors, everything wrapped in camouflage netting—what Downey calls Catification Zones. Because Downey knows that if he lets anything happen to the cats, Susan and the kids will vote him out on the street.

It had been a normal Friday evening, full of the smallness of life that sustains Downey these days. His son Exton plays in the sixth-seventh-eighth-grade basketball league and they’d all gone to his game at the high school, after which Exton went to a sleepover. The house was quiet now—the chef had gone home; the alpacas (Dandy, Fuzzy, Sadie, Jess, and Buttercup), the goats (Cutieboots, Memo, Zoltar, and Pepper—the only one Downey’s kids let him name), and the other animals were asleep outside; and Downey was maybe going to find something new to watch on his iPad Pro now that he’d finished The Curse.

But where were Winnie and Willow? He called to his nine-year-old daughter, Avri, in her room, and it turned out that the kittens had crawled up inside her bed frame, either trapped or hiding, and she couldn’t lure them out. There’s no bottom under the frame—it’s like a futon—plus Avri has about a hundred blankets on her bed (“like chain mail,” Downey says), so they were both peeling off the covers while he was trying to lift the mattress and reach under and then blam! one of the cats came flying out, scared the crap out of him, and the other one went that way and—

It was a whole thing.

He’s telling me this over a cup of coffee the next morning. Why is he telling me this? I don’t know, but it’s funny. I then knock over my coffee—this is one minute into our interview—and look frantically for something with which to wipe the umber splotch off his white kitchen table. But he says, “No, don’t touch it!” He splays his hands in the air, staring at the spill as if he were framing a shot. “It’s perfect.”

I look at the spill and—well, it is . . . kind of . . . perfect.

By pretending that my klutz move was an act of inadvertent artistic creation, Downey has, in this moment, saved me from humiliation. I didn’t know it then, but it was clear when I listened to the tape later that from that moment on, for the next five hours, this interview would be different. He would lead, and I would follow, and it would hardly clock as an interview at all but rather a sort of conversation. In fact, it would be unlike any conversation I had ever had in my life.

He sits at the round white table in the bright, white kitchen, dressed in baggy camo. Behind him is the coffee station: a Moccamaster, an elaborate espresso machine, and a jumble of eco-friendly plastic cubes that say happy, his new coffee company. I’ve brought him honey I bought at a farm stand up the road. He thanks me very much and studies the label, then informs me that what I assumed was local honey is actually from Delano, California, a small city near Bakersfield full of enormous processing plants. Awesome. He smiles and saves me from embarrassment again: “Well, think locally, buy regionally!”

I’m barely asking questions, because when Downey talks you want to listen. His mind is always operating on several levels, and you want to find out where he’s going, so you don’t step on his thoughts. He then fills the short lulls with kaleidoscopic soliloquies that skitter from thought to idea to memory and I’m hypnotized. Like:

Me: What do you want to do that you haven’t done?

Downey: Everything I haven’t done. It’s natural to bolster one’s delicate ego by imagining that everything’s been said, done, and experienced. And/or I love a bit of contempt prior to investigation. But I think that’s really what I’ve bumped up against in the last—let’s call it thousand days. Said, ‘Oh, it’s not even just contrary action,’ and see what happens. It’s more like I notice folks, myself included, tend to hold ourselves in bondage based on our self-limiting beliefs. So then I go, Okay, well obviously I don’t have self-limiting beliefs in the area of you-name-it where it’s pretty clear that you’re creating a reality according to some pretty good expectations or with some confidence or with knowing how you get there—the steps. And then there’s—I love this phrase—You want problems in areas where you didn’t used to have areas . . .

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He goes on. I nod and try to keep up, each sentence a kind of charged particle. For many years in the eighties and nineties, Downey did everything big. He led a big Hollywood life, had an enormous drug problem, and made tons of movies. He hadn’t had much of a childhood—his father, known as Senior in the family, directed avant-garde films. His parents separated when he was twelve, and his father moved to Los Angeles with Downey’s sister while he stayed in New York with his mother. There wasn’t a lot of what he calls the small stuff at all, and he ached for a normal family life.

Once, when he was around thirty, still up and down with his addiction, he stopped by to see his friend Mel Gibson, with whom he had starred in Air America in 1990. “I was in some shabby little room with all my children,” Gibson says. “I had this tribe of kids, and they were all kind of youngish, and they were lying all over me, watching some crappy movie on TV and laughing. And Robert came in and sat and watched the TV, but I think he was watching us. When he got up to leave, I went out with him and he said, ‘Man, how do you do that? You’re like a saint.’ He looked at that in some kind of wonder. I think he really wanted that sense of family.”

Downey and his wife, Susan, a producer, have been married for eighteen years and have two children together, Exton and Avri. During the pandemic, they took regular walks on the beach below their home for what he calls walking couples therapy: “Trying to figure out where we’re at, what’s pissing us off, what are we afraid of, what do we want, what will bring us closer together, how do we measure ourselves against relationships that we define as exemplary and not be repeaters or over-emulate? How do we want to shape our life?”

When Downey’s not off shooting a movie for weeks at a time and Susan’s not mired in postproduction, weekdays go something like this: The two walk Exton and Avri to a cabin near the main house where the kids are home schooled by a teacher. They then go to their offices (on the premises), then try to meet up for lunch, which is sometimes a working lunch to discuss a project for Team Downey, their production company. They check in with the kids after school. It seems a happy home. Small (though quite large).

This article appeared in the April/May 2024 issue of Esquire

I ask Downey what he likes to read. “Well, let’s see,” he says, grabbing another Nicorette and a stack of books from a kitchen shelf.

“We’ve got the Rick Rubin,” he says. (The music producer’s recent book, The Creative Act, is on top.)

“We got a little twelve-step action.” (A book about recovery.)

“I’m still diving into Strauss’s book, Men and Decisions. ” (This, a dense book by former Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss , the man he plays in Oppenheimer, was published in 1962. Downey’s edition is old, in excellent condition, and signed by Strauss.)

“That’s the one we just did.” ( Cool Food, by Downey and climate writer Thomas Kostigen, a manifesto about climate-friendly foods, with recipes.)

“Oh, looga this.” He grabs The Book of Symbols, a guide to the meanings of visual symbols throughout time, and he starts leafing to the pages he’s dog-eared. “It just shows . . . everything: the Crescent. Rain. The Pine Tree. I don’t know why, but I love this stuff. I think you get so much energy and data. Shipwreck. Oh my God—Thread! Helmet, for sure.” (Because Iron Man . )

The Apron page is flagged. His brow crinkles.

“Why did I go to Apron? Oh: ‘The apron of the body, the abdomen and pelvic area that contains the organs of generation, lends its shape and potency to the apron of costume.’ That’s why. Oh: ‘Cooks, bakers, artisans. Artisans wear aprons to protect them from the material of their work, but such aprons also carry that evocation of a chthonic generative fire.’ C-h-t-o . . . thonic? Chthonic. Is that an e or—? Motherfucker.”

He speaks into his phone now, seeking help: “C-h-t-h-o-n-i-c. Ch-thonic. C-h-t-h-o-n-i . . . By the way”—he is trying to look up the definition on his phone, which can’t find the word—“I mean, come on.” Finally, his phone says, “Thonic.” “ ‘Concerning, belonging to, or inhabiting’ ”—he looks up at me like a surprised Goonie—“ ‘the underworld! A chthonic deity.’ Dude. This is a big moment for us.” He snaps the book closed and is off again, unspooling thoughts with only lame promptings from me. (“Really?” “Your father?” “Wow.”) About The Sympathizer , his upcoming series; about Downey’s Dream Cars, his recent eco-mod car-reno show; about filming Sr. , the 2022 documentary on his father. This is one of his great and many gifts, this ability to move immense volumes of words from his brain to his lips at high speed and have them emerge in a long ribbon of enchanting stories and real-time analysis that you don’t hear so much as . . . watch.

He pauses to breathe, then says, “I haven’t really let you ask a question. Maybe we should feather a few in.” I want to know how all of this life—dad and mom and the seventies and the eighties and drugs and family and kids and everything—shows up in the performances we see onscreen. I ask this in a rambling way, and before I finish, he begins:

“As you’re talking, I keep thinking of the typical movie shot where a detective is spreading all these things out on the floor and trying to make sense of it,” he says. “One’s own life, I think for anyone, is a bit of a mystery—not to solve but at least to try to understand. I’m not very good at it, insomuch as I’m not great at—it’s hard not to affect the experiment just by enacting it, so I tend to catch myself going, Oh, you’re reframing this in this context now. Or: You want to be seen in a favorable light, so the thing you should say to the person recording all this stuff is this. And part of me is just like, Ugh, I’m exhausting myself in two directions. But”—he drums the table, buh-da-bum —“hold on. Gimme twenty seconds.”

He hops up. On the refrigerator is a smiling cartoon of Susan, a leftover visual aid from an elaborate toast he made at her fiftieth-birthday party. As he walks across the kitchen, Downey touches it. Just taps three fingers on the image of his wife while he whisks past it. I don’t assume he knows I see this, one of the smallest and largest acts of romantic love I have ever witnessed.

He returns to the kitchen after twenty seconds carrying sheafs of old papers in protective plastic sleeves, which he handles as if they were delicate antiquities. The first bundle is an exchange of handwritten notes between Robert Downey Sr. and the composer Jack Nitzsche, most of which are inchoate lyrics for songs they planned to record. (Sample lines: “Don’t think I’m narcissistic / It’s all quite artistic” . . . “Luigi, Luigi, to be a magician, there’s no repetition” . . . “You yell timber / And I fall on top of you” . . . “Never could fuck to the blues.”)

More pages: a story he wrote—Robert Downey, age nine—titled “TRX: A Love Story.” It’s on yellowed construction paper, held together with tape and time, each page crowded with his neat penmanship and careful drawings. The tale is something about a boy who steals a pair of sneakers but then, crippled by guilt, decides to give them back. Downey reads what he wrote five decades ago: “ ‘What about bro and sis, the presents they’ll miss? I can’t do this. I say they don’t fit, put on my jacket and split.’ It’s like my dad had me writing Beat poetry about shoplifting.”

This ephemera appeared coincidentally in his mail over the past few weeks, sent by old friends and family, which mystified and delighted him. “I presume everything is lost to history,” he says. “Anything that was ever written on paper, anything that’s not in a data file or on a thumb drive, is fucking gone. Anything that was in storage has been sold, because all of us miscreants couldn’t make the payments for the containers. And yet the world is telling you that there are these artifacts out there. Make of them what you will, but we’re giving you back some of your data. ”

As we sift through the pages, the household is happening around him. Avri pads across the kitchen floor wearing a cat mask, hopping into Downey’s lap. (“Avridowney!” he calls her.) Susan, glisten-y from a workout, comes and goes after talking about the afternoon’s logistics. (He greets her with “Hi, Downey!” and says to me, “Here’s the sweaty boss.”) Downey slaps the kitchen table when everyone’s gone. “This is my fucking writing desk,” he says. “I love it that there’s all these distractions coming in, you can see the ocean, I can see what Monty’s up to. What’s up, boy? There he is!”

The cat just stares. “What the fuck is going through his mind right now,” Downey says.

Outside: the warm Pacific air, a lolling tree swing, Kunekune pigs lazing in the distance. He’s been talking for a while about Sr., the documentary, and I ask him about something that stuck out to me. In one scene, Downey speaks with his father about Senior’s addiction to cocaine and marijuana.

Sr.: Fifteen years of total fucking insanity.

Jr.: Boy, man. You know, I think we would be remiss to not discuss its effect on me.

Sr.: Boy, yeah. I would sure love to miss that discussion.

They laugh. And they don’t have that discussion. I ask Downey if such a disquisition ever happened, before or after that, and why it isn’t in the film.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “First of all, knowing that he was unwell and not long for this earth, there’s nothing more hilarious than some adult child of an alcoholic demanding their moment of retribution be fucking captured and documented. And then all of a sudden this movie is no longer about anything that has to do with reality. It’s now some sort of subconscious vendetta. And the other thing is, between he and I and the psychologist and family-therapy weeks and other people that we’ve intervened on in the many years since we’d both been clean, you just realize we’re not in our crisis, or our projection, anymore. We’re more on the winning side, trying to offer assistance to others. But yeah, I can think of a half a dozen times when it got down and dirty.”

Did his father feel guilty?

“Oh, I’m sure. Yeah. But I also know that he was not a big proponent of guilt being a useful thing and that most guilt is unnatural guilt. It’s projected societal socio-pseudo-religious guilt. And with Laura”—Senior’s second wife, whom he nursed through ALS until her death—“he didn’t have time to think about processing. He was not a big processor of his own past, I’ll tell you that much—I don’t think he ever had a single session with a therapist. But he had many instances of living amends, many instances of karmic debt, if that’s real, being relieved. I think when he left this earth, his soul was light as a feather. What better thing? It was a classy as fuck exit, I’ll tell you that much. I don’t know your experience or anyone else’s, but I think there’s a fear for any son that his father will die like a coward.”

Downey stares at me for a moment, then cracks up laughing, loud, eyes wide, as if he has just shocked himself.

“Come on, dude!”

The shorthand story of Susan Downey in Hollywood, and in many articles about her and her husband, is that she saved him. From the vicious addiction that found its nadir in a wad of black-tar heroin, from the state prison where he’d spent a year, from the time in 1996 when he wandered into that house in Malibu out of his mind and woke up in a child’s (other wise empty) bedroom, from all of it—she was his avowed savior. It’s an apocryphal characterization, not without a whit of truth but mostly a book report by a kid who didn’t do the reading.

“Everybody loves the simple narrative of somehow I came in and turned his life around and blah, blah, blah, ” Susan says. “But I can tell you that I would never be who I am without him in my life. His trajectory is just the easier one to chart because he’s had to live his ups and downs in public. When we met, we were fortunate that he was in a place where he was open to do things differently than he had historically. But you know what? So was I.”

Downey seems grateful to her not for saving him, exactly, but for awakening him to possibility. “It’s beyond us being two humans who cohabitate and have built a life together. There’s something about her that remains almost entirely a mystery,” he says. “I still—I’ll see her across the kitchen and study her as though I’m a private investigator. And I’m not looking for some hidden motive. It’s just . . . she’s a full-length mirror.”

A shorthand version of Downey himself in his dark years is his character in 1987’s Less Than Zero : drug addicted, cast out by his family, without hope. The performance wasn’t autobiographical, but that era was a bad time for Downey. The latex applied by makeup artists to look like crust at the corners of his mouth is haunting to see today. (“I found him heartbreaking in Less Than Zero, and I found him heartbreaking at the time,” says James Spader , who played his dealer in the film and didn’t see him again for about twenty years, when they were filming Avengers: Age of Ultron . )

Gibson ran into Downey at a gym sometime in the late nineties, when Downey was near rock bottom. He asked Downey to meet up for coffee. They began a friendship marked by helping each other when one of them was, as Downey says, “in the barrel.”

“One time, I got into a bit of a sticky situation where it kind of ended my career. I was drunk in the back of a police car and I said some stupid shit, and all of a sudden: blacklisted. I’m the poster boy for canceled,” Gibson says, referring to his 2006 arrest in Malibu for driving under the influence, during which, according to police reports, he made drunken comments disparaging Jews. “A couple of years into that he invited me to some kind of award he was getting—we always had this kind of seesaw thing, where if he was on the wagon, I was falling off, and if I was on the wagon, he was falling off. So I was pretty much nonexistent in Hollywood at the time, and he stood up and spoke for me. It was a bold and generous and kind gesture. I loved him for that.”

(The event was the 2011 American Cinematheque Awards ceremony, at which Downey, who is Jewish, asked Hollywood—“unless you are completely without sin, in which case you picked the wrong fucking industry”—to join him in “forgiving my friend his trespasses, offering him the same clean slate you have given me, and allowing him to continue his great and ongoing contribution to our collective art without shame.”)

Jodie Foster , a longtime friend of both Downey and Gibson, cast Gibson in The Beaver (2011) after his arrest and in 1995 cast Downey in Home for the Holidays, deep in his addiction era, when many filmmakers considered him too risky to hire. “I took him aside at one point during filming and said, ‘Look, I couldn’t be more grateful for what you’ve given in this film,’ ” she says. “ ‘But I’m scared of what happens to you next. Right now you are incredibly good at balancing on the barstool. But it’s really precarious, and I’m not sure how that’s going to end.’ ”

I ask Foster what it was about Downey that made her believe in him. “What was so interesting about him then was what a genius he was—there was more creativity in his little finger than I will ever have in my whole life—but he did not have the discipline. He was so out there that all of that wonderful talent was kind of just, like, flailing his arms in the water and making a big mess. But it was in there somewhere, right? Because now he is somebody who’s become disciplined almost as a way of surviving.”

Then she says, “I have faith in people’s ability to change if they want it, and he really wanted it. And Mel, too.”

( Ben Stiller , who directed Tropic Thunder, also calls him a genius: “I really do feel like that’s the word for him. Although a genius is someone who might not have to work as hard, and Robert works incredibly hard.”)

Downey has a way of regarding everything in his life—big stuff, missing cats, random artifacts in the mail, Oscar campaigns—on the same scale, piles of fascinating puzzle pieces that fit together in a way none of us may ever understand but that is nonetheless intoxicating for him to try to figure out. (This is part of why talking with him can be, as Gwyneth Paltrow puts it, “nonlinear, like talking to a Dalí painting.”)

That expansive view of life also seems to inform his belief in generosity—giving and taking and vouching and loyalty and restitution, and “if you want to have a friend, be a friend,” as he says.

His own instinctive generosity emerges in forms both grand and almost undetectable. The first time Hoa Xuande, the young star of The Sympathizer, stepped on set to film with Downey, Downey approached him. “He said, ‘Brother, we’re going to screw this thing up together. Don’t worry about it,’ ” Xuande says. “He could see how nervous I was, and I appreciated that.”

And when he hears of someone lost in the same struggle that almost killed him, he extends saving grace almost out of habit. “I recently had an issue with a friend I was trying to help in that regard,” says Paltrow, “and Robert will pick up the FaceTime while he’s in the bath and help me. I think he’s created an abundance of all the wonderful stuff in life, and he creates abundance for other people, too. It’s like the healthy side of addiction. When abundance is in its healthy form, I think this is what it looks like.”

Susan was already a successful producer when she met Downey on the set of Gothika in 2003. Today, their work lives and their personal lives are what Susan calls “completely intermixed,” especially on a day when the excitement of the Oppenheimer nomination converges with a recent publicity boost for Downey’s Dream Cars and the promotion of and postproduction work on The Sympathizer.

Which, by the way: holy shit. It wasn’t the obvious next move after playing Tony Stark in nine films over eleven years followed by a supporting role in a prestige film. The seven-episode series, which premieres on HBO on April 14, is based on a dizzying novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. Its main character, identified only as the Captain, is a communist spy posing as a South Vietnamese military officer who is among the tens of thousands of Vietnamese citizens airlifted to the U. S. after the Vietnam War. It’s a brutal satire that unteaches everything you think you know about that war and its aftermath, told from a Vietnamese point of view—a counternarrative of identity and nationalism and immigration, an irresistible story for this moment. Downey is an executive producer and plays four different roles—all white, male, American archetypes. That idea came from Park Chan-wook, the legendary Korean filmmaker best known for Oldboy, who directed the first three episodes of The Sympathizer.

Downey loved the multi-role idea. “I knew that playing Strauss, in Oppenheimer, was going to be like picking fly shit out of pepper—that it was going to be extremely exacting, that it was going to be . . . not confining, but liberating by its varied implicit limitations of what my usual toolbox is,” he says. “So I had a feeling that, like a coiled spring, Sympathizer would be my unwind.”

But even in a tightly scripted episodic show based on an intricate novel and with an exacting director, Downey found room to do what he always does: improvise. “I started to wonder whether Robert had ten writers at his house who he hired to come up with different lines, which he would memorize and pretend they were improv,” Park says. “How could it be that he comes up with such lines so quickly?”

On Iron Man, Paltrow eventually stopped bothering to learn her lines at all. “There would be this process of [director] Jon Favreau and Robert and I going into Jon’s trailer in the morning and Robert being like, ‘I’m not fucking saying these lines’ and throwing them out. And then live improv-ing either in the trailer or on the set,” she says. “I think in order for something to feel alive for Robert, it has to feel fresh, and he makes it fresh by making it feel like it was just invented. So many of those famous lines were written ten minutes before we said them.”

“So this is a Peruvian-style lobster salad on crispy rice, so you’ve got aji amarillo in there, some ginger, some sesame. We have a miso soup, and this is a vegetable takoyaki, so kind of like a round pancake with—”

“Motherfucker,” says Downey, looking at the spread his private chef has served.

“—pickled ginger, cabbage, yuzu aioli, and some Bull-Dog sauce. And then a simple salad with some greens, shaved carrots, purple radish.”

We are sitting outside the Shell, a sixty-five-hundred-square-foot structure up the driveway from the main house. Designed by the architect Nicolò Bini, it uses an earthquake-resistant design whereby neoprene bladders are covered with concrete and then inflated, creating an undulating form. When the concrete cures, the bladders are deflated, leaving a concrete bubble: the house. It’s an engineering feat, an environmentally conscious antidote to the global housing shortage, and a very cool house. There are bedrooms, a kitchen the size of a small café, and a screening room in which Downey watched me watch rough-cut scenes from The Sympathizer.

Outside, picking at our Peruvian lobster, my phone buzzes. It’s my seventeen-year-old, FaceTiming me from back in New York.

“Take it, take it!” Downey says. “Talk to your son!”

I hesitate, but I know John’s at home sweating his college-application essay and probably needs help. I tell Downey this and then answer the call. Within seconds, Downey grabs the phone.

“What’s up, bro? How’s your essay, Ese?”

John gives a nervous laugh—he’s seen every Iron Man movie a dozen times and now, holy crap, it’s the guy.

“Um, yeah, it’s my college essay.”

“On?” Downey asks, probably expecting it to be about how this kid got over not making the track team or spent time volunteering with Habitat for Humanity or something.

“Oh—I mean, it’s about my, like, brother and how I’ve gotten through it, and my passion for flying.”

Downey looks at me. I tell John I haven’t mentioned anything about my other son, his younger brother.

“Oh. My brother got, like, cancer, about five years ago, and so yeah, it’s just been hard, but I’ve been able to get through it. And flying. I want to be a commercial pilot when I grow up.”

Downey is upbeat and tells John about some pilots he knows. He wishes my son good luck with the essay. Once the call ends, Downey reflects on what it must be like for John to write about his brother’s illness for the purpose of getting into college.

“It’s hard to give yourself permission to let your experience benefit you when it’s resultant of what has to be classified as a tragedy,” he says.

“I think he feels guilty,” I tell him.

“He mustn’t. He fucking mustn’t. But: Mustn’t is easy. ‘Can, may, shall, must.’ He needn’t. ”

The chef returns, smiling with plates.

“Last little bit is just some miso Chilean sea bass with some blistered snap peas and a light miso vinaigrette,” he announces.

“You’ve done it again,” Downey says—then laughs, then mimics himself. “ ‘Good luck with that essay and your brother who got leukemia that left him brain damaged—what is this, lobster on a rice cake?’ ” His face snaps to serious: “Because the crazy thing about life, and the things that are important to not feel guilty about, is those things are right up against each other.”

“I’m probably not supposed to do this, but will you tell John what you just told me, about guilt?”

Downey practically grabs the phone out of my hand.

“Hey bro, sorry to call you back.”

John, with another nervous laugh: “No problem.”

“I’m sittin’ here with your pops. And listen, I have similes to your experience in my life, and it’s really hard to not feel guilty about them being part of your story, that on some level could benefit you by sharing them, because you never want to profit in any way off something that could be labeled as a tragedy—even though that’s all up to interpretation and life is very fucking mysterious. You needn’t burden yourself with that. It’s an exercise. And if you’re stuck, just ask for the next right-indicated action. Take a second—like we’ve had all these lulls in our interview today. But it’s gonna come. The writer’s block on something like this is probably some sort of unnatural guilt. I’m just guessing.”

John is silent, taking his turn at processing Downey’s exquisite, perceptive language.

“Given your druthers, where would you go to college?”

Pause. “What?”

“Where do you want to go to school if you could pick anywhere right now?”

John gives him the list.

“Cool. You gotta understand, I got my GED in prison, so I’m not really your best counselor in this area. But I do know something about making lemonade. Squeeze it, dude. Because otherwise the fortunes of others, or lack thereof, is all for fucking nothing.”

Pause. “Okay.”

“Your win is his win. All right. I didn’t think your dad and I were gonna get this deep for our fucking Esquire interview. But it just went there, and I’m glad it did.”

After he hangs up, Downey holds his napkin to his face for a long minute. When he pulls it away, there are tears on his cheeks. I pause for a moment (I mean, this is one of the great actors of our time . . .), but he seems genuinely moved. He starts to talk, but something seems to catch in his throat.

The chef serves us cups of medium-roast Happy coffee. Downey sips it. “Goddammit, this one’s good,” he says of the coffee he helped create. “Fucking two years of development. It’s like everything. I’m terrible when it comes to getting things done done. I can handle the development phase; it’s just when you see how the sausage is made, and you see that it is pushing a metric ton of shit through a tin horn to get a gram of anything done done, you just go, like, Who invented people ?” At this, Downey laughs so hard he stomps his feet, slaps the table, and lets out a cathartic snort.

By the time I got back to my hotel from Downey’s house, John had sent his finished essay to my in-box. He had been trying to write that essay for six months. Now, a couple hours after he’d gotten off the phone with Downey, it was done. And it was beautiful.

Six Weeks Later

He is at a party within a party, cloistered behind a velvet rope in a packed, glittering room high above Los Angeles. It’s close to midnight, eight hours after Jimmy Kimmel opened the Oscars ceremony with a thud of a joke about Downey’s drug history and six hours after Ke Huy Quan called his name, Hollywood leaped to its feet as if so proud of their boy after all these years, and Downey gave an acceptance speech that included the line of the night: “You loved me back to life.” Susan gets them coffees, which he spills.

The next morning, his friend the photographer Davis Factor takes pictures of him and Susan and the kids for a few hours, chronicling the day for their family history. They’re in the hallways of the Beverly Hills Hotel, laughing and dancing and taking pictures. Sylvester Stallone walks by, stops, and says, “Congratulations, man.”

A couple of sunny mornings later, his world, as it turns out, is still small. Susan has a bit of a stomachache, and she is spooning some Barney almond butter onto a gluten-free cracker. Downey is at the kitchen table. He has some voice-over work to do later, for The Sympathizer, and then Exton has baseball—a big game against a rival team.

“Last I checked, it’s Wednesday,” he says.

Post-Oscar questions:

The Kimmel joke? “I don’t care. I love Jimmy Kimmel. I think he’s a national treasure.”

Standing onstage at the ceremony, in front of the world? “I was just trying to hold my mud.”

How about the Marvel Cinematic Universe . Would he ever return to it, as an Academy Award winner? “Happily. It’s too integral a part of my DNA. That role chose me. And look, I always say, Never, ever bet against Kevin Feige. It is a losing bet. He’s the house. He will always win.”

And our coffee spills, which now bookend this story? “Klutzy magic.”

It’s done now. This morning, he’s looking forward. Everything means something. Crescent. Pine tree. Apron. Rain. Academy Award. “I’m hopefully alighting to greener pastures, because in the final analysis, these things are meant to be signals, not signs. They’re meant to point to something, not to be a destination in and of themselves,” he says. “It’s like what Tony Stark says to Pepper Potts when he gets out of the cave and makes it home: ‘All right, vacation’s over.’ ”

Photo at top: Coat and trousers, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello; tank top by Calvin Klein; boots by Marsèll; belt with chain by Alexander McQueen; sunglasses by Ahlem. Photography by: Norman Jean Roy Styling by: Alison Edmond Grooming by: Davy Newkirk using American Crew at the Wall Group Production by: Jill Roy at 3Star Productions Set design by: Bette Adams for MHS Artists Tailoring by: Hasmik Kourinian Design Director: Rockwell Harwood Contributing Visuals Director: James Morris Executive Producer, Video: Dorenna Newton Executive Director, Entertainment: Randi Peck

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Robert Downey Jr. And His Wife Get Real About The Narrative That She ‘Turned His Life Around’ After His Past Struggles

"His trajectory is just the easier one to chart."

Robert Downey Jr ., who was a 2024 Oscar winner for his standout performance in Oppenheimer , seems to cherish his life away from the spotlight even more than the award accolades. Married for 18 years, he and his wife, successful Sweet Tooth producer Susan Downey, have built a nurturing home for their two children, Exton and Avri. Now, RDJ and his wife are discussing their relationship dynamics, particularly getting honest about the narrative that she "turned his life around" after his past struggles.

The charismatic Marvel Cinematic Universe alum has often had his personal life under the microscope, especially his battles with substance abuse and his subsequent resurgence in Hollywood. It's a narrative ripe for the sensationalist storytelling often accompanying celebrity culture. Yet, in the face of public fascination, in a recent interview with Esquire , Susan Downey provides a refreshingly grounded perspective on their partnership and mutual evolution. She told the outlet:

Everybody loves the simple narrative of somehow I came in and turned his life around and blah, blah, blah. But I can tell you that I would never be who I am without him in my life. His trajectory is just the easier one to chart because he’s had to live his ups and downs in public. When we met, we were fortunate that he was in a place where he was open to do things differently than he had historically. But you know what? So was I.

Robert Downey Jr., for his part, further reflected on the depth of their relationship beyond the typical celebrity marriage. The Dolittle star added:

It’s beyond us being two humans who cohabitate and have built a life together. There’s something about her that remains almost entirely a mystery. I still—I’ll see her across the kitchen and study her as though I’m a private investigator. And I’m not looking for some hidden motive. It’s just . . . she’s a full-length mirror.

The Downeys' story challenges the simplistic narratives of heroism and salvation often portrayed in the media. It seems their story is one of mutual support and growth, offering a deeper insight into how they navigate personal development and partnership under the glaring spotlight of fame.

As one of Hollywood's power couples, the Downeys not only thrive in their personal life but also in their professional collaborations. They played a pivotal role in bringing the charming series Sweet Tooth to Netflix . Despite their successful teamwork, only some projects hit the mark. After his long stint with Marvel's MCU, Robert opened up about his decision to star in Dolittle , choosing a family-friendly film about a doctor who communicates with animals. However, the film flopped critically at the box office, with co-star Seth Rogen revealing the studio knew about the film's potential issues.

Dolittle may have been a bit of a setback, but the Chaplin star's recent Oscar win underscores his versatility and star power. When RDJ celebrated the achievement on social media and, needless to say, the Kiss Kiss Bang Bang veteran can do anything he wants next. from a career standpoint. Yet, according to Susan, Robert's win hasn't significantly altered their day-to-day life, maintaining the grounded nature of their home despite the high-profile victory. One hopes that these two continue to enjoy a healthy marriage, one that cultivates growth for the both of them.

Looking ahead, Robert Downey Jr. is set to appear in the HBO series The Sympathizer , which is based on the novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen and co-produced by RDJ and Susan. The series will be available for streaming with a Max subscription . Meanwhile, Hulu subscribers can revisit this year's Oscars ceremony or watch his award-winning performance in Oppenheimer , which is available with a Peacock subscription . 

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Ryan graduated from Missouri State University with a BA in English/Creative Writing. An expert in all things horror, Ryan enjoys covering a wide variety of topics. He's also a lifelong comic book fan and an avid watcher of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. 

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Robert Downey Jr.'s Family: All About His Wife, Kids, and Parents

Much like Iron Man , he married a co-worker.

Oppenheimer star and bedrock of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Robert Downey, Jr. is known for his on-screen charisma and ability to juggle comedy and drama. Off-screen, though, he's got more of a cool dad vibe, enjoying life with his wife and kids and staying young at heart. Check out this montage of his 57th year he posted to Instagram for a fun peek at his numerous and diverse projects:

And below, read on for more information about RDJ's family: 

Robert Downey, Jr.'s dad, Robert Downey, Sr., was a filmmaker

Known simply as Robert Downey for most of his career, the writer-director made low-budget counter-culture satirical films in the 1960s and '70s. Small parts in his father's films gave Robert Downey, Jr. his first taste of life on a movie set. Downey, Sr. passed away in 2021 at the age of 85, shortly after filming a documentary with his son titled Sr. , which is streaming on Netflix. 

The actor's mother, Elsie Ford, also appeared in some of Downey, Sr.'s projects.

His wife, Susan, is a producer

Yep, it's one big happy entertainment industry family! Robert Downey, Jr. met Susan Levin, now Susan Downey, while working on the 2003 horror film Gothika ; he was a star, she was co-president of Dark Castle Entertainment. According to Entertainment Tonight , they announced their engagement just two months later, and tied the knot in a Jewish ceremony in 2005.

“We were up in Montreal prepping for  Gothika , and we had lunch with the director and Halle Berry,” Susan told The Hollywood Reporter of her first impression of the man who would become her husband. “Everybody else ordered Japanese, but Robert told us how oatmeal was the ‘superfood.’ He brought his own packets of oatmeal to have at lunch. And he had this box of various herbs and stuff. And then he started doing these yoga moves. I mean, he was interesting but weird.”

In the same piece, Downey Jr. credits Susan with helping him achieve longterm sobriety after a struggle with substance abuse, as well as his big career comeback. “She is the font of all good things,” he said.

The Ally McBeal star had an equally life-changing effect on Susan; “I was very focused, driven, rigid, work-oriented,” she said of her pre-RDJ life. “I didn’t care about having a family or making a home. I didn’t think about kids. It’s not that I didn’t want those things, I just didn’t think about them. And then I had someone who came in as a tornado, this creative, beautiful ball of insane energy and passion. And it completely opened me up.”

In 2010, Mr. and Mrs. Downey co-founded Team Downey, a film and television production company.

RELATED: Why Are Parts of Oppenheimer in Black and White?

About Robert Downey, Jr.'s three kids

Downey, Jr. shares son Indio, a musician, with his ex-wife, Deborah Falconer, and has daughter Avri and son Exton with Susan.

RELATED: Kate Winslet Spills About Jimmy Fallon's Audition for The Holiday

He's a huge supporter of his son's band, and wrote lovingly of him for his 29th birthday, sharing on Instagram , "Happiest of 29th bdays to Indio Falconer Downey. His growth as an Artist and man have been astonishing. Over the last several years, many storms have been weathered, and he’s emerged as one of my favorite recording Artists, no joke. Anyone who knows him will tell you he’s one of the kindest, strongest, most talented, and least materialistic humans they know. I dropped by a recording session a few weeks back and witnessed his musicianship up close and was literally gobsmacked."

Stream  Oppenheimer  on Peacock now. 

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How Robert Downey Jr. Feels After Becoming an Oscar Winner (Exclusive)

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Robert Downey Jr. says things haven't changed much for him since  his 2024 Oscars win . 

Talking with ET's Kevin Frazier from the premiere of his new HBO show, The Sympathizer , on Tuesday, the 59-year-old Iron Man actor and his wife, Susan Downey , joked about things being as normal as ever after he took home the Best Supporting Actor trophy for his role in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer in March.

"Not really," Susan said of things being different post-win. "What's great is you win an Oscar, and the next morning, the kids are still giving him grief. Like, they don't care, you know? It's a great humility."

Robert -- who previously scored Oscar noms for Chaplin in 1993 and Tropic Thunder in 2009 -- said that for him, the key to keeping things stable is to keep his nose down, focus on the work and stay humble. 

"I'll say this, it was a great season. And the best antidote to staying out of ego and all that is being involved in a project like this, like Sympathizer, " Downey Jr. shared. "I think [it's] an important piece of storytelling, so I'm fortunate."

The show -- an adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s homonymous novel -- is classified as an espionage thriller and "cross-culture satire" following a spy (Hoa Xuande) living in Los Angeles after the Vietnam War and his realization that his his cloak-and-dagger activities are far from done.

For his part, Robert serves as executive producer alongside Oldboy director Park Chan-Wook and plays multiple characters throughout the seven-episode miniseries, including the unsuspecting spy mentor of Xuande's protagonist. Robert said it wasn't a difficult situation for him to step into, however, as he was "in excellent company" in scenes with himself. 

When asked what he thinks about the possibility that he could be looking at an Emmy nomination (and potential win) for his role in the same year that he won an Oscar, the Sherlock Holmes star kept it humble and veered credit to his co-stars.

"Great," he said of the possible double wins. "I think Kieu [Chinh] and Sandra [Oh] are the ones to keep an eye on, they're both fantastic in this. The whole cast is exceptional. In fact, I played multiple characters just so I wouldn't get lost in the shuffle of all this Vietnamese talent." 

Should he pull off a nomination and win, he would join the legendary Helen Mirren who claimed both an Emmy and an Oscar within months of each other back in 2007 for The Queen and  Prime Suspect: The Final Act. 

Watch the trailer for The Sympathizer in the player below:  

The show also stars Emmy winner Sandra Oh, Fred Nguyen Khanh, Toan Le, Phanxine, Vy Le, Ky Duyen, Kieu Chinh, Duy Nguyen and Alan Trong. 

The Sympathizer premieres on HBO at 9 p.m. on April 14. 

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Robert Downey Jr - Biography

American actor robert has starred in a plethora of action films including the likes of sherlock holmes and iron man.

Who is Robert Downey Jr?

"I know very little about acting. I'm just an incredibly gifted faker," Robert Downey Jr once insisted. Whatever his method, it's served him well during a successful career which has spanned four decades and produced a Golden Globe, a SAG trophy and two Oscar nominations. Not bad for a faker.

Robert Downey Jr was born on April 4, 1965, in New York, to Robert Sr, an independent filmmaker, and Elsie, an actress. His childhood was colourful. "Dad was doing these crazy films. Mom would pick me up at school wearing this big quilted cape," he remembers. "I felt like I was in a JD Salinger story." 

Robert Sr cast his son as a puppy in his feature film The Pound, and Robert caught the acting bug. Three years after dropping out of high school aged 17 he was starring on popular US sketch comedy programme Saturday Night Live and had a string of Eighties film credits including teen comedy Weird Science and Less Than Zero, which got him noticed by film critics.

From there he progressed to bigger projects such as Air America with established stars like Mel Gibson and Soap Dish with Whoopi Goldberg. Then in 1992 his Hollywood status was confirmed when he landed his first Oscar nomination for his masterful portrayal of Charlie Chaplin in Chaplin .

TV fans will be familiar with Robert for his stint as a lawyer on Ally McBeal . He was popular with viewers and TV pundits alike, garnering a SAG Award and a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Calista Flockhart's on-screen love interest Larry. While he's battled substance abuse for most of his career, spending lengthy stretches in treatment and detention centres, Robert has been sober since 2003, thanks to his family, therapy, yoga, meditation and the practice of wing chun kung fu. 

He's also found support in the form of Hollywood pals including Mel Gibson and Sean Penn, with whom he bonded quickly. "In a relatively short time he was a better friend than some people I'd known for ages," says Robert. As he began to overcome his demons in the 2000s Robert came back from years in the wilderness after Mel paid the insurance bond which would allow him to star in 2003's The Singing Detective . 

This paved the way for a career comeback and a string of successful roles, including Gothika and the hugely successful action flick Iron Man in 2008. It was his comic turn in Tropic Thunder , though, which sealed his return - landing him his second Academy Award nod in 2009. 

His Dating History

On the relationship front, he lived with actress Sarah Jessica Parker for seven years in the Eighties before wedding model and aspiring singer Deborah Falconer in 1992. 

Their son Indio arrived a year later, but it was not meant to be, and they split in 1996. In 2003 Robert became engaged to Gothika producer Susan Levin , whom he met on set. The two wed in the Long Island town of Amagansett before a star-studded selection of friends and loved ones, including Keanu Reeves , Sting   and Ellen Barkin, in August 2005.

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Short Bio » Film Actor » Robert Downey Jr.

Robert Downey Jr.

Robert Downey Jr. has been married twice. His first wife was Deborah Falconer . They married in 1992 and divorced in 2004 due to Robert’s drug abuse. They have a son together. He is currently married to Susan Levin and they have two children together.

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Robert and Susan Downey Jr. Opened Up About Their Support For Each Other

A t the 2024 Academy Awards , just about everyone knew that Robert Downey Jr. would win Best Supporting Actor for his turn in Oppenheimer —and cap it off with a damn good acceptance speech. From the podium, Downey Jr. told his wife, Susan, "You loved me back to life," But for Susan, Downey Jr.'s arrival in her life was just as important.

"Everybody loves the simple narrative of somehow I came in and turned his life around and blah, blah, blah," she told Esquire in our latest cover story , which features Downey Jr. “But I can tell you that I would never be who I am without him in my life. His trajectory is just the easier one to chart because he’s had to live his ups and downs in public. When we met, we were fortunate that he was in a place where he was open to do things differently than he had historically. But you know what? So was I."

When Downey Jr. landed the starring role in 2008's Iron Man —a superhero film that would begin a massively successful cinematic universe for the next 16 years and counting—the couple was already three years into their marriage. The Marvel star's struggles with drug addiction was long in the rearview mirror. "It’s beyond us being two humans who cohabitate and have built a life together," Downey Jr. said in his Esquire interview. "There’s something about her that remains almost entirely a mystery. I still—I’ll see her across the kitchen and study her as though I’m a private investigator. And I’m not looking for some hidden motive. It’s just... she’s a full-length mirror."

Thankfully, Downey Jr. never lost his brilliant sense of humor. At the Oscars, Jimmy Kimmel opened the show with a crack at the movie star, referring to the "highest points" of his career. From the audience, Downey Jr. signaled for Kimmel to move to the next bit. He knows the business—and he's a good sport. "I don’t care," Downey Jr. told Esquire of the moment. "I love Jimmy Kimmel. I think he’s a national treasure... I was just trying to hold my mud."

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How ‘the sympathizer’ star hoa xuande transformed himself to play a vietnamese double agent.

The Australian newcomer, who had simply hoped to be “the token Asian on TV” someday, prevailed through eight months of auditions to win the lead in the HBO-A24 drama.

By Rebecca Sun

Rebecca Sun

Senior Editor, Diversity & Inclusion

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Even toward the end of The Sympathizer ’s six-month shoot, Hoa Xuande would still sometimes look out over the set in disbelief and think, “Am I really sitting here? Are they really letting me do this?”

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“This show was going to work or not based on this piece of casting,” says executive producer Susan Downey. “Finding The Captain was the most exhaustive and sweeping search I’ve ever been a part of.” The requirements for the part included fluency in Vietnamese and English, the ability to play guitar, possession of a driver’s license and being “charming and intelligent but with a veiled dark side,” as co-showrunner Don McKellar puts it.

The exec producers say that Xuande’s tape came in early and impressed them immediately, but the 36-year-old actor still was subject to an eight-month audition process that included flying to Korea (to meet with Park) and to Los Angeles from his home in Australia.

“By the time we were at his final screen test,” adds Susan Downey, “he had refined his portrayal — making it clear that he possessed the complexity, nuance, discipline and overall acting prowess required to lead our show.”

Xuande made a few pit stops before embarking on an acting career. Born in Sydney to Vietnamese immigrant parents, he grew up in Melbourne playing sports — Australian rules football, track, swimming — then moved back to Sydney at 18 on his own and “just fucked around for a little bit,” earning a diploma in journalism and taking odd jobs working in bars and selling credit cards and telecommunication products door-to-door. It was at a bar gig that he began getting to know actors and other creatives, eventually trying his own hand at amateur theater. A director told him that he was gifted in acting but advised him to seek training if he wanted to get serious about the craft. So a decade ago, he applied to and was accepted by the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.

“That’s the acting school you go to to become Cate Blanchett,” explains Ronny Chieng, whose Australian comedy series Ronny Chieng: International Student was Xuande’s first job, as a series regular, after graduating from the academy. “I didn’t know how green he was,” continues Chieng, “because on set he was professional, cheery and he really popped onscreen. When he told me he was in the final round for The Sympathizer , I knew this would vindicate so much. Thank you, Buddha, for casting him in this!”

During the shoot — with four months in L.A. and two months in Thailand (posing as Vietnam because of The Sympathizer ’s politically controversial content) — Xuande admits to being stressed and overwhelmed, both by the heavy content of the story and by his responsibility on the production. “I shot pretty much every day and had like one and a half days off, and a lot of the time I was just thinking, ‘I’m in way over my head on this,’ ” he says.

Oh approached McKellar early during the shoot, concerned about the well-being of their newcomer leading man. “It was an incredibly taxing shoot,” McKellar says. “By the end, when we were shooting in Thailand, I could see the toll it had taken on his body and spirit. He floated through the reeducation camp set like a wandering ghost. This may have been intentional because it was perfect for where he was in the story. But I remember thinking that if the shoot was one week longer, we would have a real ghost on our hands.”

Xuande credits his veteran scene partners for their indispensable support. “Sandra really mothered me, and Robert really fathered me. Sandra would speak up on my behalf sometimes, and Robert would do really nice things that I never thought he would do, like never moving on from a take until I was happy,” he says.

And Robert Downey Jr. says he’s down for more. “First, he’s a fun hang, and no matter how much was on his plate prep-wise, we always found a way to make space for a laugh together,” he says. “Over the course of what was a very complicated and taxing shoot, I witnessed his quiet confidence blossom. Can’t wait to see what he does next, and I’m already thinking of another project for us.” 

This story first appeared in the April 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe .

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Robert Downey Jr, No. 1 Popular The Digital Biography

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Table of Contents

Personal life.

Robert Downey Jr. is an American Actor , Comedian, film producer, screenwriter, and singer-songwriter. He was born on 4 April 1965 in Greenwich Village, Manhattan (New York).

His height is 1.74 meters (5 feet 8 inches). He is an American citizen. He follows the Buddhist and Jewish religions.

His father, Robert Downey Sr., was also a film writer, actor, director, and producer. His mother, Elsie Ann Downey, was also an actress in her husband’s movies.

His father died on 7 July 2021, and his mother died in 2014. He was first married to Sarah Jessica Parker in 1984 and divorced in 1991 after seven years.

RDJ has an older sister, Allyson. On 27 August 2005, he married Susan. They have three children. Indio Falconer Downey and Exton Elias Downey are his two sons, and Avri Roel Downey is his daughter.

Robert Downey Jr.’s acting Career

Robert Downey Sr. debuted at a very young as a child artist in the absurdist comedy ‘Pound’ playing a sick puppy in 1970. At 7, He got a role in the Surrealist Western Greaser’s Palace in 1972.

As a teenager, He attended the Stagedoor Manor Performing Arts training center in upstate New York. His father was a drug addict, so at 6, he tried Marijuana drugs for the first time (he admitted that in a court hearing). He moved to California with his father, who had divorced in 1978.

He attended Santa Monica High School in Los Angeles City. But he dropped out of school and returned to New York to pursue his acting career. At 17, he did theatre.

He was part of Geva theatre’s production of ‘Alms of the middle class.’ It was a drama about the relationship b/w a father and his estranged adolescent son.

In 1983, He played a theatre role in the off-broadway musical American Passion produced by Norman Lear. RDJ was part of the Saturday Night Live season 1985-86 that got terrible ratings.

Even he was fired from the show. Some people said that RDJ was the worst performer of that season. In 1985, He played the character of a high school bully in John Hughes’ ‘Weird Science.’ 1986, he played James Spader’s character’s sidekick in Turf Turf.

He was offered the role of Duckie in John Hughes’ film ‘Pretty in Pink’ in 1986. In 1987, He got his first lead role as Molly Ringwald in Pickup Artist (1987).

In’ Less than Zero,’ he also played a drug-addicted rich kid, Julian Wells, in the same year. In 1988, he was part of Drama 1969. In 1989, he got a role in ‘Chances Are,’ in 1990’s ‘Air America,’ and in 1991’s ‘Saopdish’.

In 1992, he got his career-defining role as Charlie Chaplin the Chaplin movie. He was nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars in 1992. He won the BAFTA award.

Robert Downey Jr. got chances in some high-budget movies/shows like Chances Are (1989), Air America (1990), Soapdish (1991), and Chaplin (1992).

In 1993, he was part of the ‘Heart & Souls,’ ‘Shortcuts,’ and a documentary, ‘The Last Party.’ In 1994, he played significant roles in ‘Only You,’ and ‘Natural Born Killers.’

In 1995, He got chances in the movies like ‘Restoration,’ ‘Richard 3,’ and ‘Home for the Holidays.’ In 1997, he was part of ‘Two girls and a guy.’

In 1998, He played a special agent, John Royce, in U.S. Marshals. In 1999, He appeared in the ‘Black and White’ movie.

At this time, his drug addiction was at its peak. He was arrested several times. He was not getting roles in even small-budget movies.

No one wanted to work with him due to his bad image in people’s eyes. He came back to mainstream film with the Gothika in the mid-2000s.

In 2004, he launched his debut musical album, The Futurist. In 2005, he played a comic role in the ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang movie. The movie was made at a budget of $15 million and grossed over $16 million at the box office.

He was selected for the Iron Man movie because of his performance in that movie. In 2008, he played the larger-than-life character Iron Man/Tony Stark.

The film hit the box office, and RDJ became a superstar overnight. He was paid only $500k for that movie with a backend profit deal of $2 million. In the same year, he appeared in the Tropic Thunder movie.

This movie also performed well at the box office, earning $196 million at a budget of $92 million. In 2009, he played the lead role in the Sherlock Holmes movie. That movie grossed over $498 million at a budget of $90 million.

In 2010, Robert Downey Jr. was back in the Iron Man Suit in the franchise’s second movie. The movie was a box office and made Downey a total amount of $10 million in fees.

In 2011, He was back in the black suit of Sherlock Holmes in the franchise’s second movie. This movie was produced by his own production company, ‘Team Downey.’

This movie grossed more than $623 million worldwide. In 2012, he played the Iron Man role in the first Avengers movie. He got a fee of $50 million (including backend deals) for that movie.

This was the start of his peak career. He became the world’s paid actor and topped the list of Forbes’ Hollywood’s highest-paid actors.

In 2013, the third and last movie of the Iron Man franchise came out, breaking box office records. RDJ was well compensated for that movie with a whopping $70 million. In 2014, He played a lawyer role in the Judge movie.

His own production company also produced this movie. It grossed over $84 million at a budget of $50 million.

In 2014, Robert Downey Jr. played a lawyer role in the Judge movie. His own production company also produced this movie.

It grossed over $84 million at a budget of $50 million. In 2015, he appeared in the second movie, Avengers: Age of Ultron. The film grossed more than $1.4 billion.

He topped Forbes’ highest-paid actor list thrice in 2013, 2014, and 2015. In 2016, he played the enemy of Steve Rogers in Captain America: Civil War movie.

He was paid $64 million for that movie, including all the backend deals. He was born with $40 million upfront, and $24 million comes from backend profit.

In 2017, RDJ appeared in an 8-minute role in the Spiderman: Homecoming movie.

He had a role of 15 minutes, but the editing cut the other part. In 2018, he was part of the Avengers Infinity War movie.

The movie earned more than $2 billion. In 2019, Robert Downey Jr. appeared in his last MCU movie, Avengers Endgame.

The film became the all-time highest-grosser at the box office, with a collection of $2.798 billion. For this movie, RDJ was paid $75 million. He earned $415 million to $445 million, combining his earnings from all his Marvel movies.

It makes his net worth to be $300 million . In 2020, his production company produced another movie, Doctor Dolittle. The film was made with a budget of $175 million and grossed more than $251 million.

RDJ was paid $20 million for this movie. He did not appear in any films in 2021 and 2022. In 2023, he will appear in the Oppenheimer movie, for which he will be paid only $4 million, per reports.

Robert Downey Jr. has real estate worth more than $40 million to $50 million. He has an extensive collection of cars and sneakers.

He is also an investor in many companies. He has been a brand ambassador for several automobiles, phones, and food companies.