The 1998 erotic thriller Robert Downey Jr was banned from making: “There were too many lawyers involved”
Only in Hollywood could suffering through a series of well-documented and highly publicised addiction issues actually help someone get a job, only for red tape and small print to ultimately cost Robert Downey Jr a role he’d been lined up to play.
Understandably, casting the star in anything in the late 1990s was seen as a gamble, if not a risk. Nobody could know for sure which version of the second-generation star would turn up: the mercurial actor with generational potential, or the troubled, wayward actor prone to getting into trouble with the law.
In 1996 alone, he’d fled from rehab after being abducted and sent there against his will by Sean Penn and Dennis Quaid, arrested in possession of heroin, crack cocaine, and a handgun while driving over the speed limit and under the influence, pleading no-contest to the charges and facing court-ordered rehab.
With that in mind, a production that was due to begin in early 1997 may not have been the best time to hire Downey Jr, but those were the exact reasons why director John McNaughton wanted him to play Sam Lombardo in his erotic thriller, Wild Things, because going public with his demons was a good look.
It’s twisted industry logic at its finest, and sold the filmmaker on the prospect. “It was during his rehab, and he’d just been on Diane Sawyer’s show,” McNaughton recalled. “And to the people in Hollywood, that was a great career move. That made him hot.” It also made him a liability waiting to happen, which is why he didn’t get the chance to pit his wits against Kevin Bacon’s Ray Duquette.
When the idea was floated to the picture’s insurance bonders, they flat-out refused to cover him, knowing there was every chance another incident was looming over the horizon. “We couldn’t make it work,” producer Rodney Liber explained. “There were just too many lawyers and insurance people and bond company people involved.”
With their first choice ruled out, it was back to the drawing board for Wild Things, which eventually hired Matt Dillon to play the role earmarked for Downey Jr. The salacious film was a minor box office hit and became a cult classic, even if the shoot was stopped in its tracks at one point by the discovery of a very real corpse bobbing down a river being used by the cast and crew.
It didn’t take long for the insurance company to discover it had made the right call, either: Wild Things wrapped shooting in July 1997, and by the end of the year, Downey Jr was back behind bars, having been sentenced to six months in prison for missing a court-ordered drug test.
In a cruel twist of fate, two weeks before the movie he was blocked from starring in was released in theatres, the eventual Academy Award winner starred in The Fugitive sequel, US Marshals, a film he loathed making so much that he called it worse than being locked up.
