Oscars 2024: Robert Downey Jr wins ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for ‘Oppenheimer’
Robert Downey Jr has won the Oscar award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for his performance in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, beating the likes of Mark Ruffalo and Robert De Niro to take home the honour.
“I’d like to thank my terrible childhood,” Downey Jr stated, taking to the stage, “I needed this job more than it needed me…What we do is meaningful and the stuff that we decide to make is important. Downey Jr also offered his thanks to his director, Nolan, as well as his co-stars, Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. This is the first time Downey Jr has won ‘Best Supporting Actor’, having been nominated on two previous occasions for 1993’s Chaplin and 2009’s Tropic Thunder.
In the film, Downey Jr plays a member of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, who was known to have had a personal feud with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘father of the atomic bomb’, played by Cillian Murphy.
In Far Out’s full-length review of Oppenheimer, we wrote, “Oppenheimer is a vital film, not just a glorification of the actions of a great mind but an examination of that mind grappling with such actions’ intense ramifications, but it would fall flat without the excellence of the cast, particularly Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr, and Benny Safdie, to name but a few.
The review continued, “With Oppenheimer, Nolan hasn’t just delivered an entertaining, thought-provoking movie as he had done with his previous efforts, but a thoroughly important one that informs even the most sheltered of us about the global situation we find ourselves in today.”
Downey Jr joins a list of established stars to have won ‘Best Supporting Actors’, which includes winners from recent years like Ke Huy Quan, Troy Kotsur and Daniel Kaluuya.
Who does Robert Downey Jr play in Oppenheimer?
In Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Robert Downey Jr plays Lewis Strauss, who was one of the original members of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, making him a vital figure in the development of nuclear weapons following World War II. In the film, Strauss is depicted as having been a scientific rival to J. Robert Oppenheimer during their youth, and this develops into a resentment that has great consequences for Oppenheimer, as Strauss became a driving force behind Oppenheimer’s security clearance at the AEC being revoked.
Coming away from the film as one of its major contributors, reflecting on his efforts, Downey Jr told AP News: “Context is so critical. The timing of the Manhattan Project, the need for it, the deployment of it, necessary or not — you can read plenty of data that would support either — regardless, the ‘why’ can be debated, but the ‘here we are now’ is the cold, hard truth”.
Continuing, he added: “Under Chris Nolan’s direction, we’re able to invite the audience to be involved in this meditation. We all know the films over the last 50 years that have been important in that way, as well as entertaining and thrilling and just cool to watch. And I guess that’s the transcendent thing about certain films, you know? And so, I got to be in one. Yay”.
Check out the trailer for Oppenheimer below.
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