RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Media Robert Downey Jr to be Iron Man

you also predicted poo would be the new big mac.

Robert Downey Jr., who plays the title character in Jon Favreau's upcoming Iron Man movie, told SCI FI Wire that he's aware that his personal history resonates with that of his character, millionaire playboy Tony Stark, who has his own history of substance abuse.

The tabloid-fodder Oscar nominee--who is perhaps better known for his prison sentence (on drug and alcohol-related charges) and rehab stints than for his critically acclaimed performances in such films as Chaplin and The Singing Detective--addressed the issue in a question from SCI FI Wire on the film's Playa Vista, Calif., set last June.

Downey, who successfully completed rehab in 2002 and by all accounts has been clean and sober since, is ready for the inevitable question.

"I think when someone has had a fundamental change, and they're not just trying to backpedal and make it seem like, 'I'm going to rehab again, everything's fine,' whateve, ... my thing is, what else is attractive [to me about the role] is, yeah, Tony Stark, he's been known to go bonkers and be so irresponsible that he's, like, too hammered to put on his shoes," Downey says in his typical elliptical way. "And [when they approached me,] I was like, 'Really?' And they were like, 'Yeah, really.'"

Even so, Downey downplays the significance of his personal history to the casting and the character. "There's so much stuff in this movie as it is that we decided not to do, like, the Pirandello thing," he says, referring to the Italian dramatist and his play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which the lines between actors and their characters are blurred. "But I get it. In a way, that's why it's, like, ideally suited for me, and I'm ideally suited for it."

In a well-known 1979 Iron Man comic arc, "Demon in a Bottle," Stark struggles with alcoholism, a first for a major superhero character.

That particular aspect of Stark's character won't come up in the first Iron Man movie, but will be addressed in any sequels, director Favreau says. He acknowledges the similarities between Stark and Downey's own personal histories, but added that the casting allowed him to go to new places.

"When we cast Robert--when he was approved and we got him to be in the movie and Marvel gave it the OK--it completely freed me," Favreau said. "Because I knew I was halfway there to having a movie that I could be proud of. ... I can't think of anybody better than him. He brings a reality, a humor, a panache, ... a life of experience. ... There's a lot of Tony Stark in him, and that's so much better than trying to teach somebody to pretend that they are funny or pretend that they are smart or pretend that they are talented."

So, no matter how good it is Pariah will hate it?

Downey enters the room wearing the same pin-striped suit he's seen wearing in the 'Iron Man' footage that was screened at the convention.

Q: Is that outfit yours or Tony Stark's?

Robert Downey Jr.: I wore it in the movie, but you'll notice it's my name on the inside, which I always thought would be weird, like if, in the scene I just went, [opens his jacket and flashes the label] you know! That wouldn't make sense.

I think I probably bitched out the costume person, "why doesn't it say Tony Stark on the inside?"

"Cause…I mean…well, cause you're real and he's not."

But I don't see it that way.

Q: Looks like you're having a hell of a fun time with this part.

Downey: Yeah. I mean, come on.

I'm the guy who can see a mediocre trailer in the theater, and everyone else goes, "oh, whatever," and I'm sitting there feeling embarrassed because I have chills. So to see something that really works, and people responding to it favorably, and to also be the person who's the guy in that…I still don't quite get it…

Q: How did it feel when they showed the trailer and people were so psyched.

Downey: I was in Kawaii shooting on this picture I'm doing there right now and all of a sudden…

I mean we're there in the middle of the jungle doing this Viet Nam comedy sequence and even out there, literally in the bush, people's blackberry's and cells going off and we were like…[pantomimes excited thumbs ups]…out there covered in mud

Q: The beard is a good look.

Downey: It's actually a totally different looks. [In Iron Man] I have sideburns and a wig.

Q: What attracted you to the role of Tony Stark/Iron Man?

Downey: He just starts off as a guy who is desperate to save his own life and is very surprised that he was put in a position where he has to do so. I don't think he had a sheltered life. I think he just was just probably in a lot of denial about the ramifications of what he did for a living.

I don't think it's a film about someone's conscience getting the better of them. I think it's a film about survival and being conflicted. I think it's a pretty apt metaphor for the 21st century human being.

We have such a wealth of information and ability and yet, twenty years ago you couldn't just go online and say, "Oh that's my opinion, I'll register it here." You tended to go out and say or do something about it, or write a letter or whatever.

I just love that kind of take-action…basically someone who has been sheltered by choice and then takes action and it's all…it's just so weird.

You go to work all these days and then the whole film is all about heart. It's subtlety laced through the footage you saw, but I got it. Every day they'd be gluing an arcade to my chest and I'd be like, "I wonder what the essence of…oh yeah! There it is! The heart, the heart center, what's your heart, what's the truth of your …?"

I read a lot of Bodie Tree bullshit and now I literally have it glued to my heart.

[mocking] "I still don't understand where this guy's coming from…"

Q: How critical was director Jon Favreau in helping you develop your version of Tony Stark?

Downey: The character is a combination of Jon and I. Tony Stark is his direction and my execution and sometimes my ideas and then his direction of those ideas. My line of dialogue that he scratched and challenged me to write something better and then his dialogue that I judged and we shot anyway.

Something that we wrote on paper and said "Wow, this isn't gonna work." And then we shot it and it really worked. Or sometimes it looked really great on paper and we got there and said, "We knew the other shoe had to drop."

We were so lucky and fortunate every day, always made the day. Always were happy with what we'd done at the end of the day. If we were less happy some days we'd give it another shot or we'd realize that it was how it was supposed to be, or maybe we didn't need it.

Q: Did you respond to the flaws in Tony Stark as something you could sink your teeth into?

Downey: Again, going back to that obvious metaphor, in that his wound or his weakness ultimately winds up being the source of his strength.

I guess Stan Lee said that he created this character on a dare to see if, in the very anti-establishment, mid-to-late 60s he could make a Howard Hughes-esque billionaire, weapons manufacturer in a very non-military-industrial-complex-oriented society…but have him have this wound. He said they'd gotten more fan mail than they'd gotten for any of their characters, particularly from women, who felt that somehow or another they could turn Tony around.

Q: You're known for being a character actor in smaller movies. What was it like working with the other actors?

Downey: I said it on the panel and she said that I was bullshitting, and I wasn't. I reminded her that I wasn't and she just shrugged me off anyway.

Gwyneth's instincts were really, really sound. John's and mine tended not to be far off on any given day, but if we weren't sure we checked with her.

Terrence is so smart and has such a knack for it. A lot of the dialogue and the ideas and things were stuff that he would be watching rehearsals for a scene he wasn't gonna be in, and then he would contribute to that.

We were really concerned about the Rhodie and Tony relationship, there are so many relationships you're juggling, and you'll see, and I won't say much about it, but we went through a series of events together, both in him coming on my massive private plane to come on this weapons test, to being in the weapons test, to after the weapons test, to after my escape and/or rescue, that are really good by kind of any movie standard, even if it wasn't an action movie. Some of it's really touching, or remarkably funny and offbeat and really pushes the limits of what you might think

That was all stuff we created.

I'm so sad that Jeff Bridges isn't here because he was kind of our…he's the old school master. During the time we were shooting I said to my son Indio, "are you ready…to see The Dude"

He goes, "Who's The Dude?"

I said, "We're going to blockbuster. We're buying 'Big Lebowski'"

[After watching it] he was like "That was awesome!"

Q: Would you do an Avengers movie?

Downey: Oh yeah! I'd probably be the best deal in the lot.

"I'm not a poster boy for good behavior and recovery in Hollywood," Robert Downey Jr. says. "I'm just a guy who knows he has a lot to be grateful for."
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For much of his adult life, Downey, 43, was caught in a ruinous cycle of drug addiction, imprisonment and disgrace. His friends, lovers and therapists all tried to help. Nothing worked.

And then, something changed.

"Five or six years ago, I saw the writing on the wall. I knew the party was over. It was time for me to come out of the Dark Ages and get real," he says.

Downey lives on a quiet cul-de-sac in Los Angeles. The house is filled with contemporary art, including pieces he did himself. On the piano is a picture of Downey costumed as the comicbook superhero he plays in his new movie, Iron Man, opening May 2.

"Look at this!" Downey exclaims delightedly, picking up a plastic doll of himself in Iron Man armor. "I've done something most people thought I'd never do. I've become a leading-man superhero in a big action movie!"

Iron Man, co-starring Gwyneth Paltrow, is the latest of Downey's more than three dozen features. Like the superhero franchises Spider-Man, Batman and Superman, it is expected to be a hugely profitable blockbuster.

"I went after Iron Man because Keanu Reeves got The Matrix, and Johnny Depp got Pirates," he says. "I'm looking at all these posters of the movies I've seen with my son, and I'm thinking, 'Damn! I could do that!' "

Downey, who says he was "tired of working my butt off doing films nobody sees," also will open later this summer in what he describes as "a very very raucous comedy called Tropic Thunder, with Ben Stiller." In the film, a send-up of Vietnam War movies, Downey wears blackface as an actor playing a black Army sergeant. The part is already inciting controversy. Downey, though, insists it is the kind of role the late Peter Sellers might have done.

Raised in a show-business family, Downey claims that by 8 he already had used drugs with his dad, a fi lmmaker. When he later dropped out of high school and moved to New York, his father wouldn't support him. "That's part of education," he observes, "the moment when your dad says, 'The gravy train is done.' "

Within a year of hitting New York, Downey began getting work as an actor. In 1984, he joined Sarah Jessica Parker in the cast of the film Firstborn. They were 19 and fell in love.

"We quickly moved in together and played house," he recalls. "It was idyllic." He and Parker settled in Los Angeles, and Downey's movie career took off after his astonishing performance in 1987's Less Than Zero. It established him, at 22, as among the finest actors of his generation.

Downey fast developed a reputation as a party boy. It didn't stop him from getting major films, but his self-indulgence subverted his relationship with Parker.

"I was so selfish," he admits. "I liked to drink, and I had a drug problem, and that didn't jibe with Sarah Jessica, because it is the furthest thing from what she is. She provided me a home and understanding. She tried to help me. She was so miffed when I didn't get my act together.

"I was making money," he continues. "I was mercurial and recklessly undisciplined and, for the most part, I was happily anesthetized. Sarah Jessica would pull me out of a hangover, and we'd go pick out furniture together." He shakes his head at the memory. "She is a force of nature!"

He and Parker stayed together for seven years. She broke up with him in 1991. "I had very much this post-adolescent, faux nihilistic, punk-rock rebellious attitude," he says. "I thought my way was so much cooler than people who were actually building lives and careers.

"I was in love with Sarah Jessica," he quietly confesses, "and love clearly was not enough. I was meant to move on. And, after some heartache, she was meant to find her home with a great star." Describing Parker's husband, actor Matthew Broderick, Downey adds, "He is a lot more gifted and grounded than I ever was. They have a great kid."

Shortly after his breakup with Parker, Downey married model Deborah Falconer, and their son, Indio, was born. "Our marriage and having a child probably kept me from going off the rails completely," he says, "but it wasn't enough to right the ship."

By 1996, Downey's drug use became public with his arrests for drug, gun and DWI offenses. Falconer left him, taking their son with her.

"You use whatever rationalization you can to justify the fact that you're not living truthfully," he observes about substance abuse. "You make this death machine seem glamorous so you can get on to the next moment. But it isn't glamorous, and it isn't fun.

"People rise out of the ashes because, at some point, they are invested with a belief in the possibility of triumph over seemingly impossible odds."

Meeting his third great love, producer Susan Levin, also helped his recovery. "Things started to change when I met my life partner, Mrs. Downey," he says, using Susan's married title as a sweet salute. She told me, 'I'm not doing that [drug] dance with you. I'm drawing a line in the sand here.' She was absolutely clear about it. That doesn't mean that other women, business associates, movie directors, insurance companies, judges and law enforcement hadn't been clear about it too. It was that, before I met Mrs. Downey, I just didn't give a goddamn. What changed is that I cared."

He pauses a moment. "She said, 'We'll build a relationship that works and will last.' I believed her. We were swept up in the promise of that. We live in this commitment to each other.

"Now it's all about becoming rooted in the mundane, in the day-to-day stuff," he continues. "Life is 70% maintenance. I think of myself as a shopkeeper or a beekeeper. I'm learning the business of building a life. Instead of getting instant gratification by getting high, I push my nose as far into the grindstone as I can. The honey, the reward, is the feeling of well-being, the continuity, the sense that I am walking toward a place I want to go."

Upstairs, his son Indio, now 14, is watching TV. "My son is gifted and artistic and has a great sense of humor," Downey tells me, "yet he's a very contemplative guy. That's good. I don't want him to be in a hurry to fi nd out who he is. I'm a guy who was in such a hurry that I missed the train four or fi ve times. I didn't understand the importance of the crossroads I found myself at. As a dad, I think that my job is to do the right thing -- to prepare him for what is coming in his life.

"I used to be so convinced that happiness was the goal," Downey says, "yet all those years I was chasing after it, I was unhappy in the pursuit. Maybe the goal really should be a life that values honor, duty, good work, friends and family."

If I was going to link to a page I jerk off to I would have posted a link to your mom's facebook page.

Whoa she has a facebook too?