Look at him standing there, a great big movie star in a great big movie, the Iron Man with nary a trace of human frailty. A scant five years ago the only time you saw Robert Downey Jr getting big play in your newspaper came when he was on a perp walk.
Yet when it came time for Marvel Studios to cast the lead for a huge franchise film, Iron Man, it bet on Downey. He is not only back in the game but at the top of it.
For years, Downey has been tagged with two shorthand references: “The greatest actor of his generation” (for his Oscar-nominated role in Chaplin) was usually quickly followed by “drug-addled lowlife” (based on multiple arrests and relapses). When it comes to that duality Downey is elliptical, but there is no mistaking that beneath all that allegorical talk there is the beating heart of a ferociously ambitious actor. Now sober, highly productive (he’ll be in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder this summer) and very much engaged as he sits in his home at the end of a cul-de-sac in Brentwood, Downey seems less surprised than the rest of us.
“The people who made this movie said they were going to screen-test some people, and I thought: ‘Well, that’s how I got Chaplin. Maybe this will work again,”’ he said. “If you’re going to spend a hundred million bucks on a movie, why not see who works?”
It doesn’t take much more than a viewing of the Iron Man trailer to sense that Downey walked on the set and said, “Yeah, I got this.” And there is a sincere logic behind his casting in this estimated US$130 million movie. The back story of genius-inventor-billionaire-arms dealer Tony Stark is plenty textured: He likes big weapons and fast women and seems to have misplaced his conscience, so it makes sense that the man who steps into both his suit of armor and his role as superhero has manifest feet of clay. After a life of squandered promise spreading mayhem everywhere, our hero has a near-death experience and finds within himself the angel of his better nature. Ring any bells?
When serious actors take on jobs involving comic books and hours in machines and makeup, they generally plug their noses and take the paycheck. Downey is having none of that. At 43, he is thrilled to be fit enough — he had spent the morning with the living room furniture pushed aside for instruction in wing chun (詠春), a Chinese martial art built on aggressive, close combat — to play a hero. He views the Big Comic Book Movie as a kind of arrival after years of lead roles in movies like The Singing Detective and The Gingerbread Man, which had cinematic pedigrees but little in the way of audiences.
“I’ve been in big movies before and never had a problem with them,” he said, munching a carry-out lunch of sole underneath a gigantic Tobias Keene painting (one of two in the room). “What is creepy and obvious is that the market was suddenly flooded with morons who thought, ‘If I’ve got US$500,000, I can make a baseball cap that has a company name on it and say I’m a filmmaker.”’
“On the contrary,” he added, “I am thrilled to have made this movie ... . I seem to have been the person who’s had to wait the longest for this kind of gratification.” He leaned forward as he spoke. “It took a while. Richard Attenborough,” he said, invoking the name of the director of Chaplin, “told me that one day your ambition will supersede all of these other impulses you have, and that will help set you straight.”
Downey’s ambition is getting some other room to work. Later this summer he will show up as Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder, a comedy that throws multiple grenades at war movie cliches. Downey’s character is an extremely mannered Australian Method actor who undergoes a pigment change to play a soulful black soldier. There is rich historical resonance in the turn. In his writer-director father’s signature film, Putney Swope, the senior Downey substituted his own voice for that of Arnold Johnson, his black lead. (In Tropic Thunder, however, the racial co-option is mocked mightily by the character played by Brandon Jackson, a member of the platoon who is black.) And he has just finished filming The Soloist, about a homeless schizophrenic who nurses hopes of performing at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
So, superhero, arch comic in blackface and sympathetic nutball. Not inconsistent with a career that has included Chaplin, Natural Born Killers, Less Than Zero and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, among some 50 other films.
Then again, he was extraordinary in other ways, once showing up to meet the director Mike Figgis two hours late, barefoot, with a loaded shotgun. It was a while in coming, but in 1996 police officers who stopped Downey noticed he was packing an unloaded .357 Magnum, along with small amounts of heroin and cocaine. Just a month after that he was cited for trespassing and being under the influence of a controlled substance after passing out in a neighbor’s (empty at the time) home.
There were rehabs that did not work, followed by jails that did not impress, ending in hard time, twice, including a one-year stretch in a state lockup where he had to fight to find a place to stand.
“I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a US$2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every since.”
His romance with mood-altering chemicals didn’t end after he got out of prison. By 2003, he was an uninsurable serial relapser famous for being pulled out of hotels or other people’s homes in an addled, disheveled state. As a movie star with a lot of pals, he lived a life beyond consequence until he finally wore out the endless mercies of the entertainment business. After he was fired from his spot on Ally McBeal, the bottom finally came, at a Burger King of all places.
On or around Independence Day in 2003, he stopped at a Burger King on the Pacific Coast Highway and threw all his drugs in the ocean. And while he was sitting there chewing on a burger, he decided he was done. This being America, five years later you can walk into that Burger King, and if you order a Kids Meal you can get your own Robert Downey Jr action figure, wrapped up in gadget ware.
Today he appears to be happily married, to the producer Susan Levin, and to have a good relationship with his teenage son from a previous marriage, Indio, who stops by at the end of the interview. All of this has come to rest in a gorgeous but not gigantic house, in a room suffused with light that bounces off a grand piano that preoccupies the room and much of his free time. It’s the kind of story that might make some misty, but Downey is more prone to the mystical.
“If I see somebody who is throwing their life away with both hands and is raging around and destroying their family, I can’t understand that person,” he said. “I’m not in that sphere of activity anymore, and I don’t understand it any more than I understood 10 or 20 years ago that somehow everything was going to turn out OK from this lousy, exotic and dark triple chapter of my life. I swear to God I don’t even really understand that planet anymore.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
A sultry sea mist blankets New Taipei City as I pedal from Tamsui District (淡水) up the coast. This might not be ideal beach weather but it’s fine weather for riding –– the cloud cover sheltering arms and legs from the scourge of the subtropical sun. The dedicated bikeway that connects downtown Taipei with the west coast of New Taipei City ends just past Fisherman’s Wharf (漁人碼頭) so I’m not the only cyclist jostling for space among the SUVs and scooters on National Highway No. 2. Many Lycra-clad enthusiasts are racing north on stealthy Giants and Meridas, rounding “the crown coast”
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and