Even when you’re ready to move on, it can be difficult to leave a job that you’ve been in for a while. In the case of Robert Downey Jr., who played Tony Stark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for over a decade, this was certainly true. After a long and complicated career in Hollywood, Downey transcended into a higher plane of stardom when he took on the role of charismatic arms manufacturer Tony Stark in “Iron Man” back in 2008. Then, there was no guarantee that the film would be a succeed, that this whole Avengers gambit Marvel was betting on would actually pay off. After all, Iron Man was hardly a fan favorite comic book character to begin with, and the superhero genre had been hit or miss for years.
But when it worked, it really worked. Downey played the character dutifully over the course of 10 films, becoming one of Marvel’s most valuable players. But eventually, even the most fun role can become creatively stifling, and any actor would begin to wonder what opportunities they were missing out on. As Downey revealed in an interview with The New York Times Magazine, the question quickly became, “How long is too long to spend in a role?”
Stretching creative muscles as an actor
“You start to wonder,” Robert Downey Jr. confessed to The New York Times Magazine, “if a muscle you have hasn’t atrophied.” After so many years as Tony Stark, he dived headfirst into his first big non-Marvel role: Which turned out to be the disastrous “Dolittle,” hardly the project you want to prove to yourself you can still hack it as an actor. So it was a relief when he was approached by Christopher Nolan to play the petty, vindictive Lewis Strauss in “Oppenheimer,” a role which saw him spend decades nursing a one-sided grudge against Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer, and earned Downey an Academy Award.
Downey admitted that he had concerns about tackling such a role after spending so long as Tony Stark, relying on what he refers to as his “go-to things … the fast-talking, charming, unpredictable, blah, blah, blah, or as my very close friend Josh Richman, a character actor, used to say, I made my bones playing ‘Milo, the offbeat buddy.'” But ultimately, “Oppenheimer” made him eager to embrace the challenge, which would strip him of any affections he could lean on as a crutch. It was a gamble, it would seem, that paid off, given the astronomical success of the film. And now Downey gets to have his cake and eat it too — the validation of an Oscar-winning performance and a Marvel paycheck for his upcoming performance as Doctor Doom. Not too shabby!
