Return to Table of Contents August 2008

Cover Story: Robert Downey Jr.
Is Downey Bulletproof?

He survived drug addiction, two jail stints and a career meltdown only to come back as this summer’s big hero, Iron Man. Now Robert Downey Jr. takes what may be his biggest on-screen risk, playing a white actor playing a black actor in the over-the-top comedy Tropic Thunder

By Jim Slotek

Who is that familiar-looking African-American actor standing next to Ben Stiller in ads for the Vietnam War movie spoof Tropic Thunder?

 

Is it (a) Terrence Howard? (b) Russell Crowe? (c) Colin Farrell? (d) Daniel Day-Lewis or (e) Robert Downey Jr.?
To some extent, it is (f) all of the above. But for the record, it is Downey, the comeback story of the summer, taking what some see as the comedic risk of his career. 

Tropic Thunder, directed by and starring Ben Stiller, is a satire set within the production of a very serious Vietnam War film. Finally exasperated by the high-maintenance cast, the director (Steve Coogan) and writer (Nick Nolte) arrange to drop them into a real Asian war zone — which the players at first think is some sort of rehearsal exercise.

 

From left: Brandon T. Jackson, Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr.

Tropic Thunder’s real target is the pretentiousness of “important” moviemaking, and Downey’s character, Kirk Lazarus, is perhaps the most important cog in the movie’s machinery of self-importance. He’s an Oscar-winning “method” actor who takes a role meant for an African-American, and, without a second thought, decides to play it as African-American.   “It’s my Australian five-time Oscar winner’s particular dysfunction that he believes he can play an African-American more effectively than any African-American can,” Downey says in a recent phone interview. He’s calling from a hotel room in Paris. “It’s a brilliant character. Ben made this very, very interesting, sophisticated, outrageous kind of farce about actors and Hollywood. And it really doesn’t stray all that far from the real thing.”   Downey admits the description of the Australian Lazarus automatically puts one in the mind of Crowe, with “bits” of Farrell and Day-Lewis. And probably several other actors alongside whose name you might find the word “important.”

Lazarus is obsessive about his role to the point that — in a making-of movie-within-the-movie — he is seen researching his role by moving in with the Black veteran on which his character is based, and taking his psychiatric medication.

 

Meanwhile, for the physicality, Downey’s friend and Iron Man castmate Terrence Howard reports, “Downey said he played me, like he literally put a picture of me up in his trailer and said, ‘I want to become Terrence.’

 

“It’s okay,” Howard adds with a laugh. “I think it’s perfect, it’s absolutely beautiful. It may open up the way for me to play a white guy one day. I’m using it as a precedent.”

 

Call it anything you want, but don’t call it “blackface.” It’s been a sensitive issue for the production, and Downey admits there were some misgivings going in. But testing indicated that audiences were able to make the distinction between “playing black” and playing a character who’s playing black. Says Downey: “It’s interesting in that as people are starting to see it, [the “blackface” issue] literally doesn’t even wind up in the top-10 list of things they’re commenting on.”

 

Not that Downey would shy away from a challenge at this point in his Phoenix-like career. Once considered uninsurable and all-but-career-dead in the late ’90s after dealing publicly, and repeatedly, with substance abuse problems, the 43-year-old is a hot property after starring in one of the summer’s biggest hits, Iron Man.

 

He was incongruously named part of “The New A-List” in a recent Entertainment Weekly feature, alongside actors half his age or less, like 21-year-old Ellen Page, 21-year-old Shia LaBeouf, 20-year-old Michael Cera and 26-year-old Seth Rogen.

 

Downey, who never met a dark indie film he didn’t like, admits it was a shift in consciousness to take roles in big commercial films. For one thing, he got to call a lot more shots than he ever thought possible.

 

The two faces of Downey in Tropic Thunder

“Between Iron Man and Tropic Thunder, I’ve discovered big movies and big-concept comedies are really cool and really fertile ground. I didn’t think these genres of movies could be so ideally suited for the way I like to express myself.   “Of course, doing high-minded drama is still interesting to me too, stuff like The Soloist,” he says of his upcoming drama with Jamie Foxx, about a schizophrenic music prodigy who ends up homeless and playing concertos under a bridge. Based on a true story, Downey plays the newspaper reporter who befriended the wayward genius.   “I’m playing a journalist again [he also played one in Zodiac], which seems to be a bit of a karmic thing for me,” Downey says. “It also makes me much nicer in interviews. I just know what a challenging job it is and what a drag it is to make an agreement to talk to someone who then promptly informs you that they don’t want to talk.”

He’ll be talking a lot for the next few years at least — what with two more Iron Man movies on his contract, and his place as a key piece of The Avengers, the superhero team from the ’60s that included the Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and Ant-Man, which Marvel wants to “cross pollinate” as a movie franchise.

 

Whichever move he makes, Downey’s karma is good, Howard says.

 

“Robert walks in completely transparent because he no longer feels you think more of him than what he is. All of his skeletons are out of the closet, which is a good place to be. All the rest of us, we spend half our time hiding and masking our demons and darker side. But we know the worst of his deeds, which is a kind of freedom.”

 

For his part, Downey says his new attitude comes from separating his life — wife Susan Downey and son Indio from a previous marriage — from the noise of celebrity. “I can say that particularly in the last bunch of years, I just am a little bit more Harrison Ford about the whole thing,” he says, referencing one of Hollywood’s biggest privacy freaks.

 

“I get a kick out of [Hollywood] and it feels like my real life because I spend so much of my life in it. But I have enough aesthetic distance to know that it’s about persona and it’s about projection and inflation instead of reality.”  

Jim Slotek writes about movies for the Toronto Sun.

 

 

HAWAIIN TROPIC While Tropic Thunder is about a director so frustrated with the spoiled cast of his Vietnam War movie that he drops them in the jungles of Nam to inject some realism, the cast of Tropic Thunder didn’t have it so bad. They shot the film on the Hawaiian paradise of Kaua’i, which, thanks to its sunny days and lush tropical vegetation, was a perfect — albeit much more cushy — stand-in for Nam. The fact that director Ben Stiller owns a home on Kaua’i, and married wife Christine Taylor on a beach on the island’s North Shore in 2000, probably didn’t hurt either. Most locals were thrilled with the production, since much of the movie’s estimated $100-million (U.S.) budget landed on their emerald shores. Plus, as many as 400 Hawaiians got work as extras — most playing Vietnamese.

Here’s how one casting call read: “Seeking men, women and children ages eight through 80 to portray thin Vietnamese villagers. No acting experience necessary. Character faces (missing teeth, etc.) are welcome.”

 

—Marni Weisz