If Robert Downey Jr. wins the supporting actor Oscar for his performance in Oppenheimer—as everyone, including his rivals, fully anticipates—he’ll finally have a bookend for another keepsake he has been holding onto for four decades. When Downey was a student at Santa Monica High School in the early ’80s, he’d already appeared in bit parts in his filmmaker father’s offbeat indie movies. But it was a role as a singing cowboy in one of the drama program’s musicals that made him think performing professionally might be something he’d like to do with his life.
“I got to do Oklahoma! at school. That was my first best-supporting-actor win ever. I was Will Parker,” he recalled during a recent American Cinematheque Q&A. “I’ve had quite a life, so [it’s amazing] that I’ve held on to anything besides my social security number. But I still have that little plastic award.”
“It’s funny what’s meaningful,” he added. “I think we’re all pretty specific in what’s important to us, and I see that thing and I go, Wow, I actually have held onto an object since, whatever it was—1982, or something like that.”
A win at the Academy Awards on Sunday would not only fulfill a dream he’s harbored since he was a teenager, it will be the climax of a three-act story that truly began when he was first nominated in 1993 for the silent-film biopic Chaplin. Act two, as Vanity Fair wrote in our recent profile of the actor, came after his recovery from a perilous and very public fall, when he rebuilt his life and career while recovering from drug and alcohol addiction. At that point, his career resurgence was powered by 2008’s Iron Man, which not only made him a global box office powerhouse, but inaugurated an entire new movie universe. That same year, he found himself nominated again by the Academy for the blistering satire Tropic Thunder—spoofing the type of arrogant actor who thinks he is impervious to everything.
A decade later, the 58-year-old Downey has a healthier, wiser, and steadier outlook on life—which he never fails to undercut with a wisecrack about his wilder past. After years spent making comic book movies and comedies that drew on his considerable natural charisma, he found himself again hungry for another transformative role like Chaplin, which elevated him from playing sidekicks and smart-asses in brat pack movies and romantic comedies into the ranks of the most talented actors of his generation.
The actor credits Oppenheimer writer-director Christopher Nolan with helping him live up to the potential that was evident back when he was first nominated for Chaplin. “He came to me at a point in my life and career and said, ‘Let’s flip the script and do something outside your realm of comfort. Let’s imagine that we can do it well,’” Downey said.
Now the actor can take a page from his Marvel Cinematic Universe nemesis, the cosmic-gem collecting Thanos: “I am inevitable.” At the risk of jinxing it, there is no greater sure-thing on Sunday than Downey.
Downey took on the role of Admiral Lewis Strauss, a longtime Washington DC official who had served at many levels of government, including being on the board of the Atomic Energy Commission, when he became the political nemesis of Cillian Murphy’s brilliant but haunted physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer. While shooting his character’s climactic breakdown at the end of the film, Downey recalled Nolan calling for repeated take after take after take to capture the cracking of this hardened bureaucrat’s ego.
“I was like, ‘All right, now I’m getting tired. I think we had it,’” Downey said. “And he goes, ‘We may have it, or we may not, but…No, I know you have got something else in you.’” An exasperated Downey said his initial response was: “No, you don’t! And I don’t!”
“It was one of those things where he was like, ‘I’m sorry but we didn’t come this far for me to let you off the hook,’” Downey continued. “It was a big moment of like, I have to break through this.… Whatever our own lazy meter is, it’s in there somewhere, and that’s the thing you have to find—and erase—to grow.”
His experience on Chaplin was similar to the pressures faced by his costar Murphy as the lead in Oppenheimer: carrying nearly every scene in a vast historical drama populated by a sprawling ensemble. But even in comparing the two performances, Downey was self-effacing. “I didn’t have the benefit of being a mature human, as you were,” he told Murphy during a joint interview. “So I wasn’t able to bring—really bring—what you brought.”
Downey is now also living up to a different type of promise from all those years ago. In a January 1993 interview with the veteran Associated Press journalist Bob Thomas, Downey acknowledged that he had been struggling with drugs and alcohol for years. In archival footage in the recent Netflix documentary Sr., the actor’s late father, the filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., expressed regret for introducing mind-altering substances to the boy when he was young.
“I was out of control. That’s a metaphor for trying to get to some different place, not being comfortable in your skin,” a 28-year-old Downey said in that 1993 interview. He recalled the euphoria of staying clean at Chaplin’s gala premiere. “God, it was so nice experiencing that night after without the need for a drink,” Downey said. “And also it was nice to remember the address of the place where I was going afterward.”
He was blunt about the reasons he was fighting to stay sober. “Time, mistakes, losing friends. Self-respect. Losing moments. Losing holidays. Turkey’s on the table, and I’m under the table. No thanks. I’ve taken some preventive measures,” Downey said.
That’s when he started making promises. “I’m no longer testing God,” Downey continued. “He’s here, and he’s a lot bigger than I am, and my arms are short.”
This wasn’t a vow he could keep. At least not then. He lost the best actor Oscar to Al Pacino for Scent of a Woman, and as the years passed, his prodigious talent kept being undermined by his monstrous addictions. In the early 2000s, drugs and alcohol knocked him off the red carpet and, briefly, into prison. Then came another rise, hard fought. Downey rehabilitated himself, got married (to producer Susan Downey, whom he met when they worked together on the 2003 horror film Gothika), and gradually reclaimed his life as an actor, even though many producers, Nolan among them, were hesitant to work with him due to his troubled reputation.
For instance, Downey was under consideration for the role of the villain Scarecrow in 2005’s Batman Begins, which Nolan ultimately gave to Murphy. “He was like, ‘I just wanted to meet you. I was going to cast you, but it was a bit scary, the idea of hiring you.’ And I was like, ‘Okay…’” Downey recalled. Even the heads of Marvel were reluctant to let director Jon Favreau and producer Kevin Feige cast him in Iron Man. “Trust me, it wasn’t some isolated executive,” the actor said of the formidable objections.
He won the part anyway, thanks to a screen test that showcased his undeniable swagger and savoir faire as Tony Stark. Box office success made him bankable, but his new work ethic and personal dedication made him reliable. More roles followed, including one that would earn him his second Oscar nod—skewering his own profession in 2008’s vulgar, shocking, and hilarious Tropic Thunder.
Playing acclaimed actor Kirk Lazarus, the kind of repeat Oscar-contender that Downey now really is, he ruthlessly mocked the self-importance that too often permeates his industry. Lazarus earnestly believes he is capable of transforming himself into a Black soldier in a drama about the Vietnam War. Offensive? Without question. Breathtakingly so. But the mockery was directed at, as Downey described him, “a supposedly brilliant actor who’s an idiot.”
“We make fun of and satirize these things because we can laugh them out of existence by how useless and futile and kind of comically stupid these tropes are, right?” Downey said. “That’s, of course, the energy and the spirit in which Ben Stiller made Tropic Thunder.”
Downey didn’t win for Tropic Thunder. The supporting actor award went instead to the late Heath Ledger for his role as the Joker in Nolan’s The Dark Night. When the filmmaker won the directing award at the Golden Globes this year, he recalled the encouragement he got from Downey back then as he grappled with the loss of Ledger, who had succumbed to the same addictive frailties that had long-plagued the Iron Man star himself.
“The only time I’ve ever been on this stage before was accepting one of these on behalf of our dear friend Heath Ledger. That was complicated and challenging for me, and in the middle of speaking I glanced up and Robert Downey Jr. caught my eye and gave me a look of love and support. The same look he’s giving me right now,” Nolan told the Golden Globe audience. “It’s the same love and support he’s shown so many people in our community over so many years.”
Downey has never shied away from honestly addressing his ups and downs, although he doesn’t tolerate having his face rubbed in them. His candor has been an inspiration to those who struggle with the same painful issues, and his endurance and success serve as an uplifting alternatives to similar stories that have ended horrifically for others. He has become the patron saint of second chances for fellow performers who have made grave mistakes or fallen on hard times, and he encourages mercy even when it places him under fire. He had, after all, benefited from the same once upon a time.
In Chaplin, Downey brought the silent film star’s story to an emotional crescendo in a scene set at the 1972 Academy Awards, just days before Chaplin’s 73rd birthday, when he was singled out for celebration by his Hollywood peers and moviegoers around the world. Win or lose, the same sentiment has brought Downey to this moment and the ceremony that will unfold on Sunday.
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