The actor who angered Robert Downey Jr so much that he broke character: “Do not touch my face”
As the figurehead of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Robert Downey Jr has shared the screen with the biggest of big names. Even outside of his commitments to Tony Stark, the star has been paired with some real titans. Zodiac placed him alongside Jake Gyllenhaal and Chloë Sevigny, he went toe-to-toe with Matt Damon and Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer, and there’s the time he went to the jungle with Jack Black and Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder. However, he probably doesn’t want that venture to come up too often these days.
Working alongside so many gigantic celebrities (and egos) is bound to generate issues, but one co-star rubbed Downey up the wrong way for a very strange reason. Rosario Dawson appeared alongside the Sherlock Holmes actor in Dito Montiel’s 2006 drama A Guide to Recognising Your Saints. Dawson plays the modern-day version of Laurie, Downey’s character’s love interest, but their relationship is anything but simple. According to an interview with Rachel Ray on her talk show, there was one scene in which this fictional animosity nearly spilt over into real life.
“We have this one scene together on a roof, and the director kept being like, ‘Really antagonise him!’” she said. “So I get into this scene, and I knock him on his forehead and be like, ‘Oh, you just think you a man,’ or something like that. And his eyes, like, [he] broke character, and he was like, ‘Do not touch my face.’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to get thrown off the roof right now.’” Dawson and Downey managed to complete the film, so it’s safe to assume that the latter never actually chucked the former off the top of a building.
A Guide to Recognising Your Saints was inspired by its director’s turbulent real life. Montiel, who Downey plays in the film, was part of the New York punk scene in the 1980s as part of the little-known band Major Conflict. As you can imagine, he saw his fair share of stuff during this time period, stuff that people were thrilled to hear about when he released his memoir in 2003.
Perhaps the stress of embodying a character in such a hectic world got to Downey while filming, or maybe this was the result of his career being in a state of flux. Iron Man was still two years away, and he was still trying to improve his image after years of well-publicised legal trouble.
This wasn’t the first time Downey had been on the receiving end of some unscripted physicality from one of his co-workers. In 1989, while he was making a courtroom drama called True Believer, the young actor was slapped in the face by James Woods. Maybe Dawson’s improvised teasing brought back bad memories of this moment, which is what caused him to bug out.
In the end, the movie didn’t end up being worth so much hassle. A Guide to Recognising Your Saints isn’t terrible or anything, but when compared to other standouts of the Downey comeback era, it doesn’t stack up. It did end up winning a Special Jury Prize at Sundance for its ensemble cast, so whatever Dawson did to make Downey so mad, at least it paid off in one sense.
