The scene Robert Downey Jr shot out of his mind on drugs: “I should not have even been anywhere but an emergency room”
Life has a way of unwinding that, while it might seem like a simple coil, can throw up unexpected moments that remind you that no path is a simple, straight line. For example, 25 years ago, nobody would have been able to guess that Robert Downey Jr would be capable of reinventing himself as one of the biggest, highest-paid, and in-demand stars in Hollywood.
During his lowest ebb, the actor was designated unhireable. Nobody would ever dispute that he was a naturally gifted performer who had the potential to be known as one of his generation’s greatest actors, but staying on the straight and narrow looked like an insurmountable obstacle for the longest time.
Of course, the unexpected domino effect that began with Mel Gibson before toppling into a terrible psychological thriller and then knocking over a box office bomb culminated in Downey Jr emerging on the other side of his highly publicised troubles as an A-list leading man when Jon Favreau’s Iron Man elevated him from the career doldrums to the very top of the A-list.
It was a remarkable turnaround, especially when his repeated run-ins with the law threatened to derail his personal and professional lives entirely. In one of his first roles following an Academy Award-nominated performance in Richard Attenborough’s biographical drama Chaplin, Downey Jr signed on to play journalist Wayne Gale in Oliver Stone’s controversy magnet Natural Born Killers.
On the page, conducting a prison interview was a straightforward scene, only for Downey to overindulge a little too much the previous evening. “I had been out on the town, nine sheets to the wind,” he explained to Esquire. “And then everything on the schedule got moved up, and suddenly, I needed to be there in two hours.”
He described it as “one of the most mortifying notifications I’ve ever received because it was a seven-page scene.” And yet, that was only the beginning. “I got to set, and I was absolutely useless,” he confessed. “I was then given a therapeutic injection of ‘B12 vitamins’ – I’m just going to put that in quotes, italics, underlined, and question marks on either side. I have never in my life experienced a more delightful nine hours.”
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what Downey Jr’s ‘vitamins’ really were, and he somehow managed to get through the day. To his surprise, the cast and crew applauded when the final take was in the can, even if he’s got an inkling as to why he was greeted so rapturously after gutting it out and pulling off a hard day’s work.
Was it because he knocked his performance out of the park? Possibly because it’s a great scene, and he’s excellent in it. On the other hand, he has his own theory on why the Natural Born Killers crew were so enthusiastic about that particular moment: “I think, intuitively, they know that I should not have even been anywhere but an an emergency room that morning.”
