To Hell and Back With Robert Downey Jr.
At a restaurant called Craft, in Los Angeles, near the new CAA building, outside, under sunlight, not on a couch but on the warm, warm ground, Robert Downey Jr. lights a cigarette, takes a sip of his double espresso, listens politely to a waitress extolling the virtues of the halibut, orders the halibut on her recommendation, regards her through the dark bubble of teardrop shades, remembers then what his first thought of the day was. (“Obligation is the mother of deformity”) and says to her, “Look, I don’t want to be an asshole here, but I’ve had a change of heart on the halibut. I’m now going Scottish salmon well-done.” After that, breathing easier, he goes on talking, almost to himself as much as to anyone else present.
“I’m between two phases right now, pre-Iron Man and post-Iron Man, and the transition can be tricky,” he says, shifting and smoking. “It used to be, I’d drive onto a studio lot, and the guard was like, ‘Less Than Zero dude, I loved Chaplin!’ Now it’s, ‘Iron Man!’ It’s not an algorithm anymore. It’s a fixed number. Things have been zeroed out; it’s the beginning of something. But right now, it’s still a void, and we tend to think of the void as an abyss or a vacuum with nothing there. In fact it’s a new road, and what you should do on this new road is close for repairs – close right away, because that old vehicle is not going to work on that new road. I mean, if the cosmos is a loving, healing thing that also spins real fast and erupts and does violent stuff, and if there really is some kind of order to the whole thing, then everything that’s led up to this moment has to be part of it, or the math doesn’t work. But in this transition phase, I really am trying to live as much like a lizard as I can. Hot, rock, sun, fly, tongue.”
Downey tugs on the leaf-green sweater knotted around his neck and rearranges himself on the ground. His words hang in the air, atmospherically. He’s got one crazy, free-floating, head-spinning way of expressing himself, and though he could say more, explain more, he doesn’t. He’s already moved on to some other rabbit hole and can’t be brought back. That’s just how his mind is. Plus he knows that we know all we need to know in order to fill in most of the blanks. It’s like this. At 43, he’s a witty, charming, fun-loving, mixed-metaphorically-minded, entirely off-slant kind of guy who got his start in mid-Eighties teen comedies like Weird Science and Back to School, spent a year on Saturday Night Live during its worst season ever, received his best early notices playing a doomed drug addict in Less Than Zero and then hit the Oscar-nominated big time with Chaplin, in 1992. For about 20 years, he was also a Hollywood profligate of the first water, a thoroughly doped-up Absolut-loving wastrel. And when voids loomed, whirl was king: He’d put the pedal to the metal, stopping only to get arrested while driving naked in his Porsche (1996); or to pass out in a stranger’s house, in a child’s bed, and wake up with medics staring at him (1996); or to spend some heel-cooling time in jail (various). About five years ago, though, he decided to clean himself up, and so far, so good. Since then, he’s continued to make movies, most of them great but small (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang; Good Night, and Good Luck; Zodiac) until Iron Man hit theaters earlier this year. And Iron Man has killed. Critics loved it, audiences loved it, ticket sales have shot past the half-billion-dollar mark, and suddenly Downey is sitting pretty once again.
“Right now, my BlackBerry is literally overloading and crashing, and the phone is never not ringing,” he says, hauling the damn thing out and turning it off. “It’s crazy. Like a Super Bowl. Like a landslide. Like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”
Which really is supergreat for him. His per-movie quote has gone into the multimillions. He’s moving into a different, bigger, better house. He’s driving a shiny black Bentley, a gift from Marvel Studios, which made Iron Man. He’s been resplendent on Leno, Letterman and The View; stellar pretending to be one of Gladys Knight’s Pips on American Idol (although he hated it: “dreadful, awful, depressing, and disquieting to my integrity”); and the only debonair presenter to take the stage at this year’s MTV Movie Awards. All good stuff. But there is the void to think about, and this particular void may last longer than most, because he’s got two more movies coming out soon, and both of them are likely to be big.
To Hell and Back With Robert Downey Jr., Page 1 of 7