Even one of the most well-paid actors on the planet has a few regrets about his career. Here's what Robert Downey Jr. lamented about leaving Iron Man.
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00:00Even one of the most well-paid actors on the planet has a few regrets about his career.
00:04Here's what Robert Downey Jr. lamented about leaving Iron Man.
00:08Even when you're ready to move on, it can be difficult to leave a job that you've been in
00:11for a while. In the case of Robert Downey Jr., who played Tony Stark in the Marvel Cinematic
00:16Universe for over a decade, this was certainly the case. After a long and complicated career
00:22in Hollywood, Downey transcended into a higher plane of stardom when he took on the role of
00:26charismatic arms manufacturer Tony Stark in Iron Man back in 2008.
00:31At the time, there was no guarantee that the film would be a success,
00:34or that the whole Avengers gambit that the then-new Marvel Studios was betting on
00:38would actually pay off. After all, Iron Man was hardly a fan-favorite comic book character to
00:43begin with, and the superhero genre had been hit-or-miss at the box office for years.
00:47But when it worked, it really worked. And following the massive phenomenon of that first film,
00:52Downey stepped back into the armor and played the character dutifully over the course of eight
00:56more movies, plus an uncredited cameo in 2008's The Incredible Hulk. In doing so,
01:01he helped to create one of the movie industry's biggest money-making franchises of all time,
01:06and become one of Marvel's most valuable players in the process.
01:09But eventually, even the most fun and lucrative role can become creatively stifling. Any actor
01:14would begin to wonder about what other opportunities they were missing out on,
01:17and Downey, who had become the de facto face of the Marvel Cinematic Universe,
01:21found himself starting to hunger for something different. As Downey revealed in an interview
01:26with The New York Times Magazine, the question quickly became,
01:28How long is too long to spend in a single role? You start to wonder if a muscle you
01:32have hasn't atrophied. After exclusively appearing as Tony Stark for several years,
01:37the actor dove headfirst into his big non-Marvel role, which turned out to be the disastrous
01:42Doolittle. Though he and his team had been excited by the possibility of him headlining a project
01:47the star hoped would become a big, fun, well-executed potential franchise, it didn't turn
01:52out that way. Nor was it the type of project you'd want to tackle in order to prove to yourself
01:56that you can still hack it as an actor.
02:01I feel respect."
02:05It was a relief, then, when he was approached by Christopher Nolan to play the petty,
02:09vindictive Louis Strauss in Oppenheimer. The role saw his character spend decades nursing
02:14a one-sided grudge against Cillian Murphy's J. Robert Oppenheimer and earn Downey an Academy
02:19Award. The actor admitted that he had concerns about tackling such a part after spending so
02:24much time embodying Marvel's Tony Stark, a character that had relied on what he refers
02:28to as his go-to things. It's the fast-talking, charming, unpredictable, blah-blah-blah,
02:33or as my very close friend Josh Richman, a character actor, used to say,
02:37I made my bones playing Milo, the offbeat buddy.
02:40But ultimately, Oppenheimer made him eager to embrace the challenge,
02:43which would strip him of any affectations he could lean on as a crutch. It was a gamble,
02:47it would seem, that paid off, given the astronomical success of the film.
02:51Now Downey gets to have his cake and eat it, too, having the validation of giving an Oscar-winning
02:56performance and then getting another absolutely massive Marvel paycheck
02:59for his upcoming performance as Doctor Doom. Not too shabby!