The unscripted slap in the face that made Robert Downey Jr a better actor: “It was like masturbating”
Improvisation isn’t a technique that works for every actor, and neither is receiving an unscripted and completely unexpected slap in the face from a scene partner, but getting palmed across the chops ultimately made Robert Downey Jr a better actor.
The second-generation star has always been fond of riffing himself, with many of his greatest roles being the ones where he’s allowed to fly off the handle and put his own stamp on a character. Of course, he’s good enough to recite dialogue verbatim without sacrificing his innate presence, even if it’s not always easy to strike the perfect balance between both worlds.
His career-defining performance as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Tony Stark wouldn’t have worked as well as it did without his freewheeling style, and the same can be said of his Academy Award-nominated turn in Tropic Thunder. On the other hand, Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer would never let him go off-script.
It was in one of his lesser films that Downey Jr became the subject of tough love that helped foster his approach to acting, with James Woods on the other side. The two shared the screen in 1989’s courtroom drama True Believer, and the latter decided to take matters into his own hands – quite literally – when a scene wasn’t playing out to his satisfaction.
“I was right on the edge of not acting but really making something happen, you know?” he recalled to Interview. “It’s like trying to really make something spontaneous or great happen. I was saying my lines, and he was just looking at me, kind of like, ‘You’re getting there, you’re getting there’. And then I laughed because it was like masturbating.”
Opting to up the ante, Woods “got his weird look and cocked his head a little bit to the side, and he just reached over and fucking cracked me right in the middle of the take.” Understandably, the young upstart was shocked that his colleague had smacked him out of nowhere, but it didn’t take long for the lightbulb to go off.
“He was saying, ‘Here is the point where you can’t let the door close’, and he put his foot in the door by slapping me, and something great happened,” Downey Jr explained. “I don’t know if they used it or not, but to me, it was a personal breakthrough because it was him saying, ‘That’s why you’re doing what you do right now, and the door is closing. Don’t let it close in the future.'”
Most people wouldn’t be too chuffed at getting slapped without warning, but Downey Jr viewed it as “like putting a flag in the ground” for a performance: “It’s something monumental. You got to the top of the mountain, and now you don’t have to go back down.” Plenty of actors would have been pissed off, but he took the opposite route and used the improvised slap as fuel to continue honing his craft.
