Why Sean Penn and Dennis Quaid kidnapped Robert Downey Jr: “He’s not to be taken lightly when he’s upset”
The best kind of friends are the ones who are willing to drop everything and help their buddy out of a tight spot, something Sean Penn and Dennis Quaid took to new levels when they effectively kidnapped Robert Downey Jr to save the wayward actor from himself.
The second-generation star had always been viewed as a preternaturally gifted talent with the ability to become one of his era’s best, but his personal issues kept getting in the way. Before he was reborn in the 2000s, Downey Jr was constantly battling his demons and almost always coming out on the losing side.
The most difficult thing about overcoming addiction is finding the strength to kick it in the first place, which is where he kept coming up short. Downey Jr was arrested multiple times, spent a couple of stints in prison, and was a regular at rehabilitation facilities, none of which seemed capable of giving him the impetus to consign his troubles to the rear-view mirror.
The mid-1990s were his lowest ebb, and after watching him constantly fall foul of the law and relapse into his addictive spirals, his friends had seen enough. In 1996, Penn and Quaid barged down his door, confiscated Downey Jr’s keys, dragged him to the airport, and made sure he boarded a private flight to Tucson, Arizona, where he would be checked into rehab.
“There’s nothing quite as disconcerting as hearing him yell at you through a door about what his intentions were for you that evening,” he recalled to Playboy the following year. “I just remember waking up or coming to and saying, ‘How the hell did he get in here?’ He’s not to be taken lightly when he’s upset. And he was upset.”
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out in the way Penn and Quaid were hoping for. After three days in rehab, Downey Jr promptly escaped with only the clothes on his back and a solitary bottle of water for company. He made his way to the nearest town, spun a web of lies, and spent the entire flight bank hitting the sauce.
“I hitched a ride for 27 miles into town, telling them something like, ‘I’m a married man. I had a room in town, and I had’, I just started bullshitting up a storm, ‘I had a lady of the evening. I woke up, and she’s taken my credit cards. I’ve got to get back to my son’s bar mitzvah,'” he explained of his deception.
Downey Jr then called his accountant, who organised the return trip. Because he was famous, “they bumped me up to first class,” and he “drank the whole hour-and-a-half flight back.” Needless to say, Penn and Quaid’s forceful intervention didn’t go according to plan, but at least he was appreciative of their efforts.
