‘Home for the Holidays’: When a movie set was shut down to stage an intervention for Robert Downey Jr
Having completed one of the most remarkable comebacks in Hollywood history and permanently consigned his demons to the rear-view mirror, it feels like a lifetime ago that it looked as though Robert Downey Jr would never come close to realising his undoubted potential.
It was clear from the beginning that the second-generation star was a monumentally talented actor, but as has often been the case with actors who gain fame and fortune at an early age, personal problems and substance abuse issues almost derailed his livelihood entirely.
Downey was more likely to be on the front page for his latest arrest or drug-fuelled escapade than his efforts in front of the camera, which reached such a point that nobody was willing to hire him because he was designated as uninsurable. Even in the embryonic stages of his resurgence, casting him was deemed as a major gamble that had the potential to backfire.
Mel Gibson was instrumental in lighting the fuse that sent Downey rocketing back into the cinematic stratosphere years after one of his closest friends in the business had already attempted to step in. Jodie Foster will defend the controversial Lethal Weapon figurehead to the hilt, and she also did her best to wade into choppy personal waters when their mutual friend turned up to set in no condition to work.
“What I said to him on that particular day, and I’ve talked to him about this before, where he came to set and was speaking in tongues, and I couldn’t understand a word he said, but he thought he was making sense, and then 20 minutes went by, and suddenly he actually started speaking English” Foster recalled of her 1995 directorial effort Home for the Holidays. “I shut down the set.”
The actor and filmmaker halted production, sent the rest of the cast and crew home for the day, and had a heart-to-heart with her troubled colleague. “I’m afraid for you,” she told him, per The Huffington Post. “Now may not be the time, but I am afraid for you. That’s the part he doesn’t remember. His family intervened at the end. The last day of shooting, we knew that it was coming.”
It wasn’t the first time Downey had come to work in absolutely no condition to perform, and it wouldn’t be the last either. However, instead of giving the wayward actor both barrels and reading him the riot act, Foster approached him from a place of compassion. No threats were made, no ultimatums were issued, and after being given the freedom and encouragement to go off-script and improvise, Home for the Holidays would end up as one of his most memorable performances from that period.
In the short term, it didn’t have the transformative effect that Foster may have been hoping for, but by the early 2000s, Downey was firmly back on the straight and narrow.
