With a past as checkered as Robert Downey Jr.’s, he should have been a shoo-in to win the role of flawed hero Tony Stark, the man donning a suit of armor in “Iron Man.”
But “Iron Man,” opening Friday, didn’t exactly drop into his lap.
“Much to my surprise, I really didn’t fit any of the criteria for the kind of actor they thought they should cast,” said Downey, 43.
As recently as five years ago, ex-junkie and ex-con Downey had to pay for his own insurance even to appear in a movie after years of drug and alcohol abuse.
Downey and director Jon Favreau knew he could play Stark, who essentially is a PG-riff on Downey’s persona, but that didn’t make it a done deal.
“Yeah, it was difficult,” Favreau said of selling Downey. “Marvel had had a lot of success with things like ‘Fantastic Four,’ where you come out with a nice young cast. Nobody’s heard of these people, but they’re kind of sexy, cracking wise, there are a lot of visuals from the comic books brought to the screen. I think they were looking to follow that model.”
The two men had to convince Marvel executives that Downey was their man. Favreau called the insurance companies, which had no problems with Downey anymore because he’d been clean for five years. They called colleagues who vouched for him. The filmmakers pointed out that even family-friendly giant Walt Disney had no problem putting Downey in “The Shaggy Dog.”
“Fortunately, creatively, everybody came on board. And to end all argument, Downey agreed to do a screen test,” Favreau said. “As soon as everyone at Marvel saw the screen test, there was no more discussion.”
Now Marvel is banking its huge franchise on Downey, and the buzz-o-meter is off the charts. Even Downey’s reached a point where he can lampoon his past drug and alcohol problems: His school principal in the recent “Charlie Bartlett” was a drinker; his newspaper reporter in “Zodiac” was a drinker. And, like the original character created by Stan Lee and others in 1963, Iron Man is a drinker. Well, Tony Stark is, anyway.
“When you have enough aesthetic distance, you can do that,” Downey said of playing substance abusers. “In ‘Less Than Zero,’ I didn’t know if art was imitating life, or what was imitating what.”
Art is certainly imitating life for Downey now. In “Iron Man,” his Stark is captured by guerrillas in Afghanistan, realizes how the arms he’s been pushing are creating more harm than good and develops a techno-suit that allows him to fly, shoot fire and escape his jail cave. It’s an origin story in which Stark sets out to atone for his life of sin — but will he be redeemed?
Downey has been redeeming himself in recent years.
“Without taking myself too seriously, there’s just sort of a focus that came in,” said Downey, who points to 2005’s noirish “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” as the project that got him to start straightening up his act — an act infamous for its drug busts, fistfights and DWIs.
Downey’s second wife, producer Susan Levin, who worked with him on “Gothika” and “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” gets credit for turning him around.
“It strangely also corresponded with me becoming a bit of a martial-arts devotee,” he said, “and a bunch of other stars lining up just so. You know, being in a great relationship … and deciding to behave in a slightly different way and really go for the gusto.”
Now he’s the “man” in Hollywood, appearing in not one but two potential summer blockbusters. Besides “Iron Man,” Downey stars in Ben Stiller’s buzz-aplenty Vietnam War-pic parody “Tropic Thunder.” If you’ve seen the trailers, you know what Downey’s up to in the Aug. 15 release, and it’s extreme: He’s playing an Australian actor playing an African-American GI, in blackface.
“Those are the two biggest genres around,” Favreau said. ” … It’s so nice to see Robert go from the guy that I had to plead the case for to get everybody to sign off on him, and now he’s one of the hottest names in Hollywood.”
Downey has another potential hit on his hands later this year: In “The Soloist,” Downey plays a newspaper reporter who meets an L.A. homeless man who happens to be a musical genius and a paranoid schizophrenic. Jamie Foxx plays the homeless man in the film, which opens on Thanksgiving.
But right now all eyes — and Downey’s concerns — are on “Iron Man.” The actor has this to say about the gripe that Iron Man rests with the likes of Daredevil some rungs below Spidey and The X-Men on the superhero popularity ladder:
“What I’ve been loving hearing lately is, ‘Well, Iron Man was always a second-tier superhero,'” he said. “I’m like, ‘Ah, operative word: was.'”
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THE MUG SHOT YEARS
The years 1996 to 2000 flashed by in a blur of drug arrests and failed drug tests for Robert Downey Jr. Here’s a highlight reel of Downey’s badness through the years:
– Arrested in 1996 while driving his Porsche down Sunset Boulevard naked, chucking phantom rats out the window.
– Wandered into a neighbor’s house and fell asleep in a child’s bed only to be awakened by paramedics in 1996.
– A 1996 arrest for DWI, heroin and firearm possession.
– Served a four-month jail term in 1997 for violating probation
– A 1998 fight with another inmate in L.A. County jail.
– Hired for the hit show “Ally McBeal” in 2000 and won a Golden Globe for it. He was subsequently fired after being arrested for drug possession.
– Did a year’s stint in prison beginning in 2000 after he violated probation.
– Finished court-ordered rehab and probation in 2002.
