After playing Iron Man in several Marvel movies for a very long time, the legendary Hollywood actor Robert Downey Jr. finally appeared in a different role in Christopher Nolan’s 2023 Oscar-winning movie Oppenheimer. Now, that he is once again back in the Marvel universe as the iconic supervillain Doctor Doom, he opened up about what he regrets the most about leaving his iconic Tony Stark character.
After a complicated career filled with several ups and downs, Downey reached a new level of celebrity status in 2008 when he landed Stark’s role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Back then, there was no assurance that the movie would succeed or that the then-new Marvel Studios’ gamble on the Avengers franchise would pay off. However, the franchise and his character did kick off globally and how.
In the process, he gave one of the biggest franchises ever and became one of the biggest fan-favorite characters, so much so, that Marvel has been going through a hard time ever since Stark’s death. But how has it been for Downey to portray the character for decades and then to bid goodbye to it? “You start to wonder if a muscle you have hasn’t atrophied,” he told New York Times magazine.
When he was asked about his concerns regarding how playing one character for such long time would affect his career, Downey Jr. said, “Yes. A hundred percent, and I knew there was a point where Chris Nolan was endorsing, let’s work those other muscles, but let’s do it while rendering you devoid of your usual go-to things.”
Following this, the actor threw himself into his first significant non-Marvel role after playing Iron Man for so long, which ultimately turned out to be the catastrophic “Dolittle.” Downey Jr. had hoped that the project he would be the face of would grow into a “big, fun, well-executed potential franchise” because he thought “at that point I was bulletproof. I was the guru of all genre movies.” He described the movie as, “Then Dolittle was a two-and-a-half-year wound of squandered opportunity.” But it did not work out that way.
Eventually, Downey Jr. received a call from Nolan who asked him to play the petty, spiteful Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer. Downey won an Academy Award for his performance, which saw his character harbor a decades-long resentment towards Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer. After spending so much time playing Marvel’s Stark, the actor acknowledged that he was apprehensive about taking on such a role. Iron Man, he said, had depended on 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.’”
In the end, though, Oppenheimer had made him eager to take on the challenge, which would deprive him of any crutches he could rely on. It appears that the risk paid off, considering the enormous box-office success of the movie, and fans worldwide couldn’t get enough of him despite his immensely dark grey character.
