The King of Hollywood: Robert Downey Jr’s several cinematic comebacks

Robert Downey Jr attending the 65th Academy Awards in Los Angeles in 1993 where he was nominated for Best Actor for his leading role in Chaplin. Photo / Getty Images

What did Robert Downey Jr know? The former Iron Man star’s decision to get out of the superhero business in 2019 now looks like the smartest career move since he got into it in 2008. Downey’s move into action blockbusters almost 16 years ago was one of the unlikeliest rebirths Hollywood had seen in a while, following a very public and professionally costly battle with drug abuse.

But if last night’s Golden Globes are anything to go by, his departure from that genre may end up topping it. For his work in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer – only his second major role since leaving Marvel’s Cinematic Universe – Downey has won the Globe for Best Supporting Actor, and is now the favourite to take the equivalent awards at both the Oscars and Baftas over the next two months.

“Amateurs seek the sun and get eaten. Power stays in the shadows,” his atomic energy adviser Lewis Strauss memorably intones in the film. But in his fifth decade in the business, Downey looks to be charting a shrewd third path: the veteran who graciously steps back from the edge of the stage just a pace or two, and through that semi-retreat ends up finding his most flattering light.

Certainly, while his wrinkles and receding hairline were all on show as Oppenheimer’s owlish atomic energy adviser Charles Strauss, Downey looked in the full flush of his professional prime – flexing subtle actorly muscles that during his decade as Marvel’s billionaire playboy Tony Stark, AKA Iron Man, he’d barely been called upon to use. When I spoke to Nolan just before Oppenheimer’s release last summer, he was audibly fizzing with excitement over how Downey’s performance would be received.

Robert Downey Jr poses with his Golden Globe for Oppenheimer at the 81st Golden Globe Awards. Photo / Getty Images

“He is one of the great movie stars, and Jon Favreau choosing him to play Iron Man was one of the great casting choices in popular cinema in the last 50 years,” Nolan said. “But it had been so long since I saw him play the truth and nuance of another human being in the way he did in, say, Chaplin” – the 1992 biopic in which Downey played the silent movie star – “and I think his work here will shock people who don’t know that side of him. And, quite frankly, even people who do.”

Chaplin was the point at which Downey originally seemed to be unstoppable. The son of the maverick New York filmmaker Robert Downey Sr, he had popped up in his father’s projects since the age of 5, before finding a niche in Hollywood’s so-called Brat Pack in his late teens. But breaking hearts and bedding chicks in the likes of Weird Science, Less than Zero and The Pick-up Artist was one thing: charming the Hollywood establishment was something else entirely. Yet in 1993, for his lead performance in Chaplin, he was nominated alongside such heavyweights as Clint Eastwood, Denzel Washington and eventual winner Al Pacino for the Best Actor Oscar, and won the Best Actor Bafta over Daniel Day-Lewis.

For any actor trying to transform youthful stardom into something more long-lasting, this would have been an enviable launch pad. Yet thanks to his spiralling substance abuse problems, Downey’s adult career all but burst into flames on the stand.

Robert Downey Jr in a scene from the film Chaplin, 1992. Photo / Getty Images

He had an unfortunate gift for getting into the sort of drug-addled scrapes that made for good tabloid copy: one evening, his neighbours returned home to find the actor passed out in their 11-year-old son’s bed (the boy wasn’t there at the time). Then there was the time in 1996 that he was stopped for speeding, only for police to discover cocaine, heroin, crack and an unloaded revolver during a search of the vehicle.

“It’s like I have a shotgun in my mouth and I’ve got my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gunmetal,” he said to a judge of his addictions in 1999 – a line you could all-too-easily imagine him delivering on screen. A potentially stabilising role on the legal comedy series Ally McBeal was lost after he was found by police wandering barefoot through the Culver City area of Los Angeles.

By the early noughties he was all but uninsurable – and therefore unemployable – and his best roles in those thin years came about through favours and acts of faith.

A 2000 Palm Springs Police report showcases one of Robert Downey Jr.'s many infamous mugshots. Photo / Getty Images

It was Mel Gibson, who perhaps saw in Downey a kindred spirit, who paid the insurance bond that enabled him to star in 2003′s The Singing Detective, and Downey’s then-girlfriend (and now wife) Susan Levin who introduced him to Lethal Weapon writer Shane Black, who was hunting for an affordable lead for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, his 2005 directorial debut.

His biggest test came two years later in David Fincher’s Zodiac, when he survived (albeit reportedly only just) the famously exacting filmmaker’s demands for upwards of 40 takes of any given scene. In a recent filmed conversation with his cast mate on that film Mark Ruffalo, Downey explained that he had recently contacted Fincher after having “developed a new respect” for him while working with Nolan, saying it was the first time he had felt his “feet put to the fire” by a director with a very specific and uncompromising approach.

Having done that, a decade of shoring up the world’s biggest movie franchise proved a doddle. While the Marvel brand would later become synonymous with interchangeable CG effects blizzards, in its early days it was built on star power, and Downey’s motormouth charisma – even just the way he could look at someone over his glasses – was the enterprise’s buttressed core.

And while the commercial and critical struggles of the more serious projects he worked on in his Marvel down-time (The Soloist, The Judge) suggested the MCU might be holding him up as much as he was it, the extraordinary popularity of his Sherlock Holmes films and his (Oscar and Bafta-nominated!) role in the provocative comedy Tropic Thunder suggested the true picture was more complex. And while it would be going too far to attribute Marvel’s post-covid nosedive to Downey’s departure, one thing is clear: the series hasn’t been the same without him.

Could he have then retired from acting outright? His roughly US$400m ($640.82m) earnings from the franchise, rising from a competitive US$500,000 ($799,938) on the first Iron Man to a reported US$75m ($120m) for Avengers: Endgame, would have certainly made that an option. And his 3ha Malibu compound with its small menagerie, stately guest houses and central “bungalow” – a low-lying, undulating concrete structure that resembles the kind of sci-fi biodome Tony Stark himself would inhabit – would have been a nice enough place to while away the years.

Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr, and Scarlett Johansson place their handprints in cement at the TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX on April 23, 2019 in Hollywood, California. Photo / FilmMagic

Instead, surprisingly, he leapt into another blockbuster: 2020′s hideous Dolittle, which made his post-MCU career look suddenly precarious. But if his multiplex-pleasing charisma was nowhere to be seen there, it has been quietly put to good use on this year’s awards circuit, where Downey has thus far been among the most charming flesh-pressers of the 2024 contenders.

And as Nolan observed, beside the quality of his performance in Oppenheimer, there is an additional pleasure in seeing a proven star immerse himself in knottier, less flattering roles. (Imagine how fun it would be to watch Tom Cruise do likewise.) As for the Oscars, they’ve long been wrestling with how to credibly pay tribute to Marvel for keeping cinemas’ tills ringing throughout the 2010s – and honouring the franchise’s leading man for his first (non-Dolittle) role since then would do that, just about.

Where the second Downaissance goes from here is currently a mystery. Only one major project has been shot so far: a black-comedy mini series set during the Vietnam War titled The Sympathiser, co-produced by Downey and Park Chan-wook, in which the actor cycles through a number of US military roles. The brief smacks of Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove – which is both wildly enticing and, post-Oppenheimer, oddly apt. If he can persuade Oscar voters to stop worrying and love the bomb, anything’s possible.