The first time Robert Downey Jr was taken seriously as an actor
By the time Iron Man swung around in 2008, Robert Downey Jr had managed to rescue his acting career from the darkest depths. After coming through in the 1980s and ’90s, Downey Jr fell into a severe drug and alcohol addiction that would significantly impact his personal life.
In fact, the actor was fired from the TV show Ally McBeal after he was arrested on drug charges and had to spend time in a substance abuse treatment facility. But in the mid-2000s, Downey Jr had pulled himself together and delivered memorable performances in The Singing Detective, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Zodiac and Tropic Thunder.
The son of Robert Downey Sr had starred in his father’s 1970 film Pound before his breakthrough came in John Hughes’ film Weird Science. It was his effort in the 1987 drama Less than Zero that looks to have had the greatest impact on Downey Jr, though, in the sense that it gave him the real belief that he could indeed act.
“I’m cast with Andrew McCarthy, James Spader, Jami Gertz, and there’s a scene on a tennis court where I’m asking my dad if I can come home, and it was kind of an impactful and a bit of a challenging scene to do,” Downey Jr once told Vanity Fair. The film is an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ debut novel of the same name.
Continuing to explain the respect he received on set, Downey Jr went on: “My first day shooting and the director, Marek Kanievka, who I argue is one of the greatest I ever got to work with, said, ‘Everyone be absolutely quiet, he’s trying to concentrate.’ He told everybody, ‘Hey, this is important’. And then I was like, ‘Oh my God, I guess I had better concentrate’.
“And I just thought for a quarter of a second about what’s it like for all fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, are they ever going to connect and understand each other?” the actor noted. “And just having that thought in my head gave me this springboard, and it wound up being a pivotal kind of day where it was the first time I felt I was taken seriously in a dramatic way.”
Less than Zero sees Andrew McCarthy play Clay, a university first-year who returns home to his native Los Angeles for the Christmas holidays to hang out with his ex-girlfriend Blair and his drug-addicted friend Julian (played, aptly perhaps, by Downey Jr) It’s a brilliant portrayal of the excessive lifestyle of 1980s LA youth.
Downey Jr also noted how Less than Zero helped him realise that “there was a cultural relevance to filmmaking”,
He added: “I’d seen it in The Breakfast Club and a bunch of other films, something about our generation having some sort of valid statement to make and the artists and filmmakers of that period. You felt like, ‘God, maybe I could be one of those folks.’”
