Robert Downey Jr does not regret wearing blackface in ‘Tropic Thunder’
The barbaric practice of blackface started almost 200 years ago as a form of comedy, an act in which white performers would don black facepaint and play on harmful stereotypes in minstrel shows. Such theatrical performances were phased out toward the end of the 19th century. However, cinema picked up where the former left off, with the dawn of Hollywood featuring a multitude of actors wearing blackface.
Shockingly, this practice continued well into the 20th century, appearing in such early Hollywood films as D. W. Griffith’s notorious 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and 1927s The Jazz Singer. As the civil rights movement began to grow in the mid-20th century, attitudes toward blackface began to change. Even though it was far less common, some movies continued to feature such harmful stereotypes up through the 1980s and into the new millennium.
One modern example of blackface appears in Ben Stiller movie Tropic Thunder, a comedy flick about a bunch of fictional Hollywood stars who became real-life soldiers in a war movie. Robert Downey Jr plays a controversial Australian method actor who goes through ‘pigmentation alteration’ to temporarily darken his skin for his portrayal of a black character, staff sergeant Lincoln Osiris.
Addressing the backlash that the film received, Downey Jr appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience in 2020 to explain why he doesn’t regret the role. “I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that, I’ll do that after Iron Man‘, and then I started thinking, ‘this is a terrible idea, wait a minute'”, he recalls, admitting that he thought twice about taking on the divisive role. The actor adds: “Then I thought, ‘hold on dude, get real here, where is your heart?’ and my heart is: A, I get to be black for a summer in my mind, so that’s in it for me”.
Arguing that he took on the role to expose the innate ego of Hollywood actors, Downey Jr explained: “I get to hold up to nature the insane self-involved hypocrisy of artists and what they think they’re allowed to do on occasion, just my opinion”. The result was one of the most controversial performances of modern cinema, even if the actor contends that “it was impossible to not have it be an offensive nightmare of a movie… 90% of my black friends were like ‘dude, that was great'”.
When asked by Rogan what the other ten per cent of his black friends thought of his performance, he replied: “I can’t disagree with them, but I know where my heart was… I think that it’s never an excuse to do something that’s out of place and out of its time, but to me, it blasted the cap on [the issue]. I think having a moral psychology is job one. Sometimes, you just gotta go, ‘Yeah, I effed up.’ In my defence, Tropic Thunder is about how wrong [blackface] is, so I take exception”.
Ben Stiller recently stated how “proud” he still was of his 2008 movie. He exclaimed on Twitter: “I make no apologies for Tropic Thunder. Don’t know who told you that. It’s always been a controversial movie since when we opened. Proud of it and the work everyone did on it”.
