The only actor who intimidated Robert Downey Jr: “I just didn’t want him to shoot me”
Robert Downey Jr has faced plenty of intimidating moments in his life and career. He was just 20 when he joined the comedy institution Saturday Night Live, later had to resurrect his career after the ignominy of drug addiction and incarceration, and then, once back on top, carried the world’s biggest franchise on his shoulders for over a decade. This isn’t a man who backs down easily—yet he has openly admitted there’s one actor who genuinely intimidated him. Hell, he even claimed to fear for his safety—and it wasn’t entirely clear whether he was joking or not.
In 1985, Downey landed one of his first dramatic acting roles in the NBC miniseries Mussolini: The Untold Story. He played Bruno, the son of the infamous Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, with a young Gabriel Byrne playing his brother. Their father, though, was played by an actor whose fearsome reputation preceded him: George C Scott.
By this point, Scott was an Oscar-winning Hollywood legend, having starred in defining movies such as Patton, Dr Strangelove, The Hustler, and Hardcore. He was an uncompromising presence on-screen, generally playing authority figures with deep reserves of intelligence and hair-trigger tempers. However, Scott was also all these things off-screen, with his status as a raging alcoholic thrown in for good measure. This made him a frightening man to be around – someone capable of being the most professional actor anyone had ever worked with one minute and a blackout-drunk madman the next.
Almost every actor he ever worked with made reference to being scared of him, not least because he often let his anger spill over into outright violence. Maureen Stapleton, who worked with Scott on the play Plaza Suite, reportedly told Mike Nichols, the production’s director, “I don’t know what to do. I’m scared of him.” Nichols supposedly replied, “My dear, everyone is scared of George C Scott.”
It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that a 20-year-old Downey was wary of the domineering, unpredictable Scott, who would have been in his late 50s when making Mussolini. He told Deadline in 2014 that Scott was the only actor who ever intimidated him, but somehow, the young star managed to win him over.
When asked how he did that, Downey quipped, “I don’t know that I did. I just didn’t want Patton to shoot me with his .45.”
Despite being mildly afraid of Scott at all times, though, Downey admitted that he was also impressed by him in some ways. When he almost decapitated himself on the Yugoslavian set by nearly running into a helicopter propeller – a story for another article – he witnessed Scott’s bellowing fury in full flow and couldn’t help admiring it.
He also claimed that people would come from far and wide to play Scott at chess, a game the fiercely brilliant yet self-destructive star excelled at – in an incredibly nonchalant way, of course. “That was really great to see,” he confessed. “And he wasn’t even really paying attention when he was doing it.”
