How a terrible horror movie sparked the Robert Downey Jr renaissance
In the mid-2000s, the prospect of Robert Downey Jr becoming one of the most in-demand and highest-paid stars in Hollywood was completely unthinkable. The actor tended to find himself in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Of course, his comeback ended up launching him into the stratosphere when he headlined Marvel Studios’ Iron Man in the summer of 2008, and he’s refused to come down from the top of the A-list ever since. However, the catalyst for that remarkable renaissance came in a terrible horror movie.
When production began on Mathieu Kassovitz’s Gothika in the spring of 2003, even hiring Downey Jr was viewed as an inherent risk. He’d lost out on a role in Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda because he couldn’t get insured by the production on account of his errant ways. His first leading role in four years in The Singing Detective only happened because friend and producer Mel Gibson paid the bond.
In fact, when he was drafted in to lend support to Halle Berry’s Miranda Grey as fellow psychologist Pete Graham, one of the conditions in his contract was that 40% of his salary would be withheld until the end of principal photography. This was, of course, to safeguard against any potential incidents stemming from his personal problems.
Gothika didn’t just mark the introduction of Downey Jr and his soon-to-be wife, Susan Levin. It also got the ball rolling on a chain of events that would culminate in him being cast as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Tony Stark.
One of the film’s producers was Joel Silver, who’d been a long-time collaborator of Shane Black, but the writer-turned-director was finding a hard time securing funding for his Kiss Kiss Bang Bang screenplay. With Silver agreeing to back the project, the perfect leading man serendipitously fell into the director’s lap.
“We’d see him in the office, and I’d sort of point him out and say, ‘Joel, that’s Robert Downey. What’s he doing?’. ‘He’s doing Gothika for me,'” Black said to CHUD. “And then when Gothika was over and it was time to do this, we kind of looked at each other and said, ‘Robert, would you read some of the lines?’ We gave him some lines to read, and we sat there just having fun with the script, and as he said the lines, for the first time, just reading them cold, it felt like I typed them right into his mouth. It was so perfect that we just loved it right there.”
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang ultimately flopped at the box office before becoming a Christmastime cult classic, but Downey Jr’s performance gained attention from one pivotal viewer. Upon watching the blackly comedic crime caper, Jon Favreau knew instantly that he’d found the perfect candidate to be his Tony Stark.
“It wasn’t the coming-out party I’d thought it would be,” Downey Jr recalled after Kiss Kiss Bang Bang sank without a trace in cinemas. Still, everything worked out better than anybody could have expected when he admitted, “It ended up being my calling card for Iron Man.”
If it wasn’t for Gothika, then Downey Jr wouldn’t have ended up in the path of either his future wife or Silver, who then partnered him up with Black in the project that would capture the attention of Favreau. It’s a remarkable set of circumstances, with the star ultimately repaying the favour by hand-picking his Kiss Kiss Bang Bang director to helm Iron Man 3.
