“I think I just buried myself”: why Robert Downey Jr feared ‘Tropic Thunder’ would ruin him
Robert Downey Jr’s trajectory in Hollywood has been more of a rollercoaster than the proverbial walk in the park or climb up a mountain. As the son of a director and an actor, he grew up in the film industry, which made his path to acting fairly smooth. However, his family also struggled with addiction, and his own drug use would end up derailing his career just as he was getting his first taste of stardom.
In the mid-1980s, Downey was part of the experimental season 11 cast of Saturday Night Live. Showrunner Lorne Michaels wanted to inject some novelty into the decade-old sketch show and decided to do so by bringing in youthful actors with modest fandoms rather than obscure but wildly talented stand-up comedians. As a result, Randy Quaid, Anthony Michael Hall, Downey, and Joan Cusack were all given a shot at comedic stardom but were quickly fired when it turned out that they could not, in fact, compensate for the lack of actual comedians.
For the rest of the ’80s, Downey was grouped in with Brat Pack, a hoard of young actors who usually had some involvement in John Hughes’s movies and tended to pal around and raise hell. He broke free of this association in 1992 when he played Charlie Chaplin in Richard Attenborough’s biopic of the silent film pioneer. Downey won rave reviews for his performance and earned his first Oscar nomination, but the breakthrough was quickly cut short.
Just as he was becoming an in-demand actor, Downey rendered himself unhirable with nearly a decade of arrests, prison time, and rehab for drug use. At one point, he had no home, no job, and no prospect of being hired, even by his friends. Everything changed once again when he landed the role of Tony Stark in Marvel’s Iron Man in 2008.
It could have been an easy victory. Iron Man was destined to be a box office juggernaut, and he could easily have ignored all other offers to focus on being a superhero. But that same year, he decided to take an extremely risky part in Ben Stiller’s Vietnam War movie parody, Tropic Thunder. In it, Downey plays an overzealous method actor who tries to win an Oscar by donning blackface and playing a Black soldier. For someone trying to redeem himself in the industry, it was, to put it mildly, quite a gamble.
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 2011, Downey conceded that he’d had a bit of buyer’s remorse after taking the part. “I signed up to do it and then I did Iron Man and I thought, ‘You know, I think I just buried myself,'” he said. “‘I did a movie that is going to reestablish me here in a little way and now I’m going to squander any goodwill I have.'”
In a great twist of irony, however, Downey earned an Oscar nomination for the Tropic Thunder performance, following on the coattails of the critical and box office smash of the first Iron Man movie. That double bill revived his career, and he’s been on a glide path ever since, becoming one of the highest-grossing actors of all time and scooping up an Academy Award for Oppenheimer for good measure.
