Iron Man Robert Downey Jr. stars in movie The Judge
HE made one of the greatest comebacks in Hollywood history after drug addiction and a recent tragedy has made Robert Downey Jr. reassess his life.
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FOR a man who managed one of the greatest comebacks in Hollywood history, it’s not surprising that Robert Downey Jr. isn’t shy on confidence.
“Depending on the day,” says the actor, with a shrug, “I can tell you that I should get an Oscar just for getting out of bed.”
Though he may not have taken that little golden man home just yet (he came close for Chaplin in 1992), he is currently the biggest movie star in the world — the success of the billion-dollar Iron Man franchise guaranteed him that.
“It’s a really weird job,” says Downey, kicking back at a fancy Beverly Hills hotel, “and I don’t know why I’m so well suited for it.”
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Downey’s latest film The Judge is a drama, a genre he hasn’t gone near since 2009’s The Soloist. Asked if he deliberately took on a dramatic role to move away from his more recent blockbuster fare, Downey shakes his head.
“It’s funny because I don’t look at it that way,” he says, dapper in a navy waistcoat and grey shirt. “I look at Iron Man 3 and I go, ‘This guy is having a complete personality meltdown and he’s supposed to be a hotshot’.
“I know it’s a different genre and it’s a less dimensional film, but I remember the scenes with the kid that felt really naturalistic to me. Having said that, as soon as you’re hogtied to something and some bad guy is telling you his plot to take over the world, you’re like, ‘That’s right, we’re making a different kind of movie here’.”
In The Judge, Downey plays Hank, a high-flying Chicago lawyer who returns to his hometown after the death of his mother and ends up staying when his estranged father (Robert Duvall), the town’s judge, is accused of murder.
“I read the script and just sat around weeping,” says Downey. “The story was heartbreaking to me.”
The Judge is the first film produced by Downey’s production company (named, yes, Team Downey), which he founded with his wife, Susan, whom he married in 2005 after meeting her on the set of Gothika.
Not only a respected producer in her own right, Susan Downey is largely credited with turning her husband’s life — and career — around.
“I loved seeing him have to battle stakes that weren’t about saving the world. Because between Sherlock Holmes and Tony Stark, that’s what he’s usually doing,” Susan says of Downey’s role in The Judge. “These stakes are in some ways far more important because they’re personal ones.”
Asked whether it was difficult for the couple to separate their personal and business relationship during filming, Downey laughs.
“I don’t know a couple that doesn’t fight. Some couples definitely shouldn’t work together ... they probably shouldn’t even vacation together. We met working and so it was just kind of a natural thing.”
“It’s funny because we’ve been doing it for so long,” adds Susan. “We met on a movie about 12 years ago; then it feels like for at least the past decade we’ve been somehow creatively intertwined, whether we were officially on each other’s movies or not. So I don’t really know another way.”
Asked if The Judge was in any way a risk for him, Downey smiles.
“I don’t know how risky anything is for somebody who dresses up and pretends to be someone else for a living,” he says.
“Maybe it was risky for the studio ... I mean, it helped that I was in it, because of my popularity in other movies.”
That’s an understatement. Downey’s massive global popularity has made him the most highly paid actor around. The Hollywood Reporter recently speculated that he had earned as much as $80 million over the past year thanks to Iron Man 3 alone.
Downey doesn’t want to talk money (“That’s boring”), but will concede that he does get annoyed when people focus on his pay packet rather than his body of work.
“The only problem that money solves is the fear of financial insecurity. It’s a big fear, but it’s just one of a thousand fears,” he says. “There are many, many problems that money doesn’t fix.”
This may sound like the musings of a man who has a stack of cash in the bank, but Downey has trodden a difficult path. His early career was defined by his brilliant turn as a drug-addled party boy (where art certainly imitated life) in 1987’s Less Than Zero.
After Chaplin, his career hit an impasse in the late 1990s and early 2000s, his drug addiction leading him to jail and in and out of rehab. (At one low point, he was found passed out on his neighbour’s bed.)
Downey’s resurgence, which fully kicked into gear around 2008, has been the stuff of Hollywood legend. He nabbed the role of Tony Stark in the first Iron Man flick despite the concerns of the studio, then followed that up with an Oscar-nominated performance as an Australian method actor donning blackface in Tropic Thunder. He was then cast in Guy Ritchie’s incarnation of Sherlock Holmes (according to Ritchie, that casting is thanks in no small part to Susan) and racked up another a success.
“I’ve been lucky these past few years,” Downey says. “People seem to like me.”
As well as appearing in next year’s The Avengers: Age Of Ultron, Downey is contracted for one more Iron Man film. He also has a burning desire to play Gepetto in a live-action adaptation of Pinocchio — “In a sort of Chico Marx meets Raging Bull way,” he explains.
Right now, though, his big production is his family. He and Susan, who are already parents to two-year-old son Exton, are expecting their second child, a girl. (Downey is also dad to 20-year-old son Indio, with ex-wife Deborah Falconer.)
Downey is excited about having a bit more oestrogen around the house.
“I like girls, I always have,” he smiles. “It’ll be great and I think it’ll really balance things out. I’m actually really looking forward to nesting for this little baby.”
At 49, Downey says that lately he’s been thinking a lot about his own mortality. His mother, who battled alcoholism for much of her adult life, recently died. And his relationship with his filmmaker father has always been up and down.
“Well, we get along great now,” he says of Robert Downey Sr, “but we don’t see each other often. It makes you realise that time is short and you want to try to connect. You want to let people know — whether it’s my generation saying it to my kids — like, ‘Hey, you know we’re actually supposed to try to prioritise each other in some way’.”
He hopes his legacy will be more than just his on-screen performances.
“When actors show off their philanthropy, it’s just another version of ego,” he says, grimacing. “But I would like to organically find my way into doing something that winds up being of greater service than just making movies, or, as my friend Tom Sizemore says, ‘Making faces for cash and chicken’.”
The Judge is now screening
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Originally published as Iron Man Robert Downey Jr. stars in movie The Judge
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