The five books that changed Robert Downey Jr’s life: “It swept me into an education”
If you were looking for someone to be the face of comic book movies, then you could do a lot worse than Robert Downey Jr. When he burst onto the scene as Tony Stark in 2008’s Iron Man, the first entry in Marvel’s lauded Cinematic Universe, Downey’s sharp tongue and affable smugness gave the genre a much-needed reinvention. Thanks to him, the MCU would go on to become the highest-grossing movie franchise of all time, breaking all kinds of box office records and setting cinematic trends that are still alive and well today.
While he may owe a lot of his success to comic books, Downey has appeared in other movies based on more traditional literature. He played Sherlock Holmes in two films directed by Guy Ritchie, with a third instalment potentially on the way. He appeared as the titular doctor in Doolittle, which, despite being awful, he described as one of the most important films of his career. Even Oppenheimer, the film that netted Downey an Oscar, was inspired by a non-fiction book.
Given that he owes a lot of his career to the written word, it should come as no surprise that Downey is a fan of books in general. In an interview with Oprah Daily, America’s long-time queen of reading, the star explained to Bethany Heltman that there were five books that had a massive impact on his life, one of which we’ve already covered.
“This one made a difference in my preparation to play Lewis Strauss,” he said of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin. This biography, which came out in 2005, details the complex life of the innovator of the atomic bomb. Christopher Nolan used it as the basis for his Oscar-winning biopic, in which Downey played Strauss, a politician who serves as the film’s main antagonist.
History is clearly something Downey is passionate about, as he also opted for Gore Vidal’s 1964 historical fiction work, Julian, inspired by the life of the short-lived Roman Emperor of the same name. “It swept me into an education about an emperor whose reign, although brief, burned bright,” the actor said. An appreciation for the past also plays into another of his choices, such as The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Released in 2016, the story is set during the height of the Vietnam War and follows an anonymous narrator who serves as both a mole in the South Vietnamese army and a cultural advisor on the set of a US-produced movie. “I grew up in the Vietnam era,” Downey said, “but never really looked at it from outside my American perspective”, claiming how the text shifted his understanding of the politics of the war.
He also sang the praises of Raymond Carver and his collection, Short Cuts: Selected Short Stories. “In the ’90s, Raymond Carver single-handedly revived the American short story,” remarked his 21st-century admirer. “A wickedly funny, surprisingly innocent meditation on loss and tenderness, all nine stories and a poem will give you hope”. These works would inspire a 1993 film by Robert Altman, with whom Carver had a strong working relationship.
Finally, Downey chose a book by Thomas M Kostigen, with whom he co-authored a book about environmentalism, Cool Food: Erasing Your Carbon Footprint One Bite at a Time, that offered him a rare, not bleak vision of the future of the Earth. “Tom K’s book inspired me to embrace the possibility that there are big-scale solutions for our climate crisis,” Downey said of Hacking Planet Earth, “that it’s not ‘too late’, and that if I was lucky, I’d write a book with him one day!”
The five books that changed Robert Downey Jr’s life
- American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin
- Julian by Gore Vidal
- The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Short Cuts: Selected Short Stories by Raymond Carver
- Hacking Planet Earth by Thomas M Kostigen
