Institute for Robert Downey Jr Studies > Required Reading

Rockin’ Robert

A string of bombs and a nasty rep haven’t dampened Robert Downey Jr’s spirits. He knows he’s one of the most gifted young actors in Hollywood. And Hollywood knows it too.

Robert Downey Jr cares these days about what he puts in his mouth. And also what comes out of it. Well, to a point, anyway. Having already told me he’s curbed his caffeine intake and banished nicotine, the 25-year-old explains he is “really trying not to eat dairy” as he peruses the menu of a studiously downscale West Hollywood “conversation” hangout and sways in rhythm to vintage Nina Simone. Downey, to whom critics have sent mash notes for irrepressible performances in movies that would have sunk most careers (Less Than Zero, The Pickup Artist, True Believer, Chances Are), has effortlessly charmed our waiter into admitting us to a closed-off upstairs section of the place. And now, casually tucking his best-pressed t-shirt into a pair of black trousers with stained-glass piping, he looks up pleadingly at our server through caterpillar eyelashes, and persuades him to bring off-menu items. Dairy items, with extra mustard.

Satisfied, Downey grins over the railing, surveying the black-clad, Sobranie-sucking patrons below, and observes: “I call this the ‘I’m-17-and-very-angry-at-my-father place,’ but, I like it during the day.” And for the next couple of hours, he speaks, and occasionally listens, as we talk about his position in Young Hollywood. Why, for example, despite the majority of his movies being bombs, does he still look like the best bet for leading man of the ‘90s? And why, despite even Air America, his latest offense, is he Movieline’s choice for Young Hollywood cover boy? “I thought, like, you asked two other guys and they said, ‘No,’” he says, laughing, and managing to hit so many notes in his reading—mouthy arrogance, irony, flippancy, insecurity, charm—that the effect is to turn the question to “Who else is there?”

Indeed, there is no one else like Downey. A bratty, sexed-up verve fuels his presence onscreen and off. The daffy, happy-go-lucky insouciance that he exudes harks back to vintage stars. He has dash. Picture him under contract to a big studio way back when, doing, maybe, Gunga Din, not Air America, Here Comes Mr. Jordan instead of Chances Are, Some Like It Hot not Back to School, The Lost Weekend not Less Than Zero. Downey can be Cary Grant and Ralph Bellamy. He can play louts, like Grant or Robert Montgomery did, and dare you to prick his balloon. He seems nimbler than anyone else in a scene, more charming. Part of it is just genetics. There’s the mouth that’s like a lewd Cupid’s, and brows that can leer comically like Groucho Marx’s, or smolder like Tyrone Power’s. But apart from looks, he’s got a running-off-at-the-mouth delivery that was made to order for farce—and when he cooks, go figure where he’ll take a scene.

But Downey—along with the Toms, Keanus, Christians, Kiefers, and Patricks of the business—flies or falls in a town that has given up on myth-making, where career guidance is catch-as-catch-can. “I need mentors,” he says, leaning forward. “People who are smart and who you’re excited just to listen to.” Downey, who shares his film salaries with an agent, a business manager, and a friend who doubles as an assistant, is in the throes of bigtime personal and professional rehab.

Following the crash landing of Air America, his CIA flyboy buddy movie with Mel Gibson, he is about to sign a studio production deal that he predicts will announce “to the industry what I’m capable of doing. This year is going to be a very big year. I’m going to find projects that I can’t fax in from my trailer. Finally, after five years, I know how everything works. I finally got my system together.”

Until recently, Downey’s internal system was anything but together. It’s a testament to his acting chops and charisma quotient that he won job after job despite rumors of outrageous, addictive excess. Life-threatening carousing. Improbable partners. Risky business. “I always had a certain snobbery about my consumption,” Downey says, crossing his legs, cocking his head to one side. “‘Oh, I don’t smoke it, it smells up the room,’” he drones in a foppish voice. “‘I’ll drink seven bottles but it has to be the right year.’ But I was out there in the field, all right, very hands-on. I loved the chase. I always thought there was something more chivalrous about not being discreet about it—that would have taken away some of the fun.”

Downey’s attitude endeared him to neither his famous partying peers nor to those who were just saying no. Why? “Maybe it’s because I used to be the guy who would offend them, then disappear into a lavatory for two hours with a seven-foot hermaphrodite. Part of me feels like I’m supposed to want to be hanging out with the ten actors whose names are always mentioned, you know? I don’t know all the people I’m supposed to know, for who I am. And it’s not just because I have a girlfriend.”

Downey met actress Sarah Jessica Parker while shooting Firstborn at 18 and they moved in together soon after. But that has never slowed him down. He gleefully recalls a typical night out, during his wilder days, at a downtown club with Loree Rodkin, his former manager. “I was wearing spats and had an Oscar Wilde look going that night—all but the boa. I offended a rather short actor by loudly and abrasively telling him in front of all these people that he was just plain too small. It got to the point where he wanted to fight me or something, so I thought I’d better go outside. I got into the back of this limousine and leaned my head out the window and my elbow caught and zapped my head. I went and got stitches but I thought ‘I really shouldn’t be alone with this’ so I went back to the place at four in the morning. There was Loree watching my friend Josh pouring gin over somebody and I come in wearing this bloodstained shirt, tripping my mind out, and she was like, ‘My god, this is my client and his friend.’ I said, ‘So where are we going now?’ I wanted to go to Carter’s for home fries or something, and she’s like, ‘Robert, it’s over.’”

And it nearly was. He overspent. Overate. Overdrank. Over-everything’d it was possible to overdo. “I’m not saying that I was where Julian was at,” Downey explains, referring to the silver spoon coke fiend he played in Less Than Zero. “I never worked when I was high.” But did anyone on a movie demand that he submit to a drug test? “Someone threatened to,” he says, “but I bribed them with a Mandrax.”

With his addictive behavior apparently in a choke-hold now, Downey calls himself “a reminder to a lot of people who were on the ‘Top Ten Most Likely to Need Reconstructive Surgery by Thursday’ list of where they’re not. I feel like the Hunter Thompson of my peer group. There’s this initial respect I get from young actors, like, ‘Boy, you’re still here!’ The bad boy shit is so over with the new generation but it’s like [they think], ‘Well, it might be over but I should jump into it for a minute.’ I did the MTV Awards, which got to be a real nightmare afterwards. I felt like I was fucking Santa: ‘Who wants to come sit on my face’s lap and tell me what they want?’ I saw Christian Slater, to whose already-nurtured delinquency I used to contribute. He’s now in the same scenario I was. I thought it was kind of cool that I was showing someone slightly younger my ropes: ‘Here are the ropes, now there’s plenty for both of us.’ I hadn’t seen him in a while and he was getting hounded and I was getting hounded and our hound crews sort of merged. I was signing something on his back and he said, ‘How do you deal with this?’ It’s cool realizing I’ve been around long enough to see the next generation coming up. I’m happy to be here as a representer of ‘Do whatever you have to do but give me the keys and I’ll drive home.’”

The rude-boy-turned-designated-driver claims he now restricts himself to caffeine. “Catch me on a Saturday when I’ve got a coffee buzz,” he says, fingers twitching in the air. “I get so excited, why, I reorganize the the linens.” So, what did Downey want from his binges? “I don’t think I ever wants to die,” he answers, his gaze level. “I think what I meant was that I wanted to change and I couldn’t think of a way to do it that was more direct. It’s really important to keep it together right now. Given an option, do I really want to alter my consciousness, which was redundant, anyway? I don’t need to have the same fucking things coming up, or to keep running into walls with relationships.” After a moment, Downey smiles slyly, rolling his eyes, as if hearing himself. “I feel like Jimmy Woods when I say stuff like that, although he comes from a much sicker, smarter place, in some ways.” Woods, once known for addictive behavior of his own, nicknamed him “Binky” when they made True Believer, and considered him a candy ass who “wore more silk than it took to land all the troops in Normandy.” Downey shrugs. “I took it as a compliment. I think I’m pretty out there.”

New Age-ism apparently ranks high on Downey’s list of replacement addictions. When he isn’t quoting The Mathematical Tourist or the Seth books, he litters his conversation with impassioned anecdotes about his and his friends’ experiences with telepathy and “lucid dreaming.” To wit: “I was playing piano this morning and I felt like something could have happened—a vision or whatever—that sounded like a little internal click. For some reason, I said, ‘No, I’m not ready for it.’ The idea of really experiencing the vastness of the psyche, that’s heavy. I’m starting to mess with the magic of life, telepathy, clairvoyance, really heavy things to process.” For almost a full minute, he stares into space, grinning beatifically. When I bring him to, he beams an okay-you-caught-me-so-what? smile and offers, “Maybe it’s the endorphins.” After all, he just left his four-times-weekly pump session at his West Hollywood gym, The Sports Connection, which he has nicknamed “The Sports Erection.”

But in Hollywood, even cloud-cuckoo-land stuff has a payday. Downey describes the photo shoot for this interview as “a ritual that was kind of sending out an energy; now I feel like a period or ‘40s movie will happen.” Or, more to the point, did the actor—who brought along a dozen or so changes of costume—want to send out to Richard Attenborough, who is preparing to direct a movie about silent movie comic Charlie Chaplin, “energy” in the form of him looking nifty in period clothes?

Downey came into the earth plane genetically programmed: Be Different or Die. His father, Robert Elias, was a high school dropout who adopted “Downey”—his stepfather’s name—when he joined the Army at 16. He married singer/actress Elsie (Robert’s mother), pitched semi-pro ball, waited tables, and sometimes acted, before making his big splash directing nose-thumbing mid-‘60s and ‘70s movies some of us got high to. Growing up, Downey “had no choice” but to watch his father’s flicks: “He was screening them in the living room.” By the time he turned eight, Downey was cast by his father as the kid who gets his neck slit by god in Greaser’s Palace, which features such weirdness as psychotic cowpokes, a topless Indian squaw, a horny gay midget and a faith-healing Christ figure who doubles as a song-and-dance man.

With Putney Swope, in which militant blacks take over a Madison Avenue ad agency, daddy cool looked as if he might flip into the mainstream. But Downey Sr. (“So sick, so fucking warped,” his son has said!) never tired of telling the Hollywood suits where to shove it, and stayed underground. In and out of schools in Queens, Forest Hills, Greenwich Village [“Either I didn’t show up or we had been out of town”], unsure whether this month his family was rich or broke, Downey Jr fought for the limelight. “I worked at it, I wanted to be entertaining,” he recalls. “I felt inadequate because I wasn’t in school much and didn’t know what was going on. When your mom’s making underground films, four out of five dentists say she doesn’t put on the shawl and drive you to work every morning: ‘I’m sorry, your father and I have to go to Florida to shoot a beach sequence that just came to his mind.’”

On the audition circuit, he won a rep for attitude, reading cold for John Hughes on Weird Science, free-associating for The Pickup Artist while lying sprawled across James Toback’s office floor, auditioning for George C. Scott’s Mussolini miniseries with purple hair. Before winning those three parts, he had bits in Baby It's You and Firstborn, then, later, held his own against Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School and Kiefer Sutherland in 1969, and obliterated Anthony Michael Hall in Johnny Be Good. In 1985, Hall, with whom he was then tight, convinced Downey to join him on the cast of Saturday Night Live, in which both were embarrassingly mirthless in the show’s nadir year. Back in movies, to measure up to his father’s casting him as a super-endowed porno star, Wolf Dangler, in Rented Lips, Downey stuffed Kleenex into his fishnet underwear. People expected Less Than Zero to say Important Things about fast-lanes drugs and sex among rich kids in Beverly Hills, but it came off instead as a Valley of the Dolls without the giggles. Still, Downey unforgettably touching and funny as a coke-addled Beverly Hills screw-up, brought out the fans in critics and the rescue fantasies in fans. “I have a strong co-dependent following,” he says, goofing, between mouthfuls of potato chips. “I like the idea that people want to nurture me, you know? That I could probably go into any major shopping center and find someone who would say the right things or, at least, rub my feet.”

One thing Downey learned on the Less Than Zero shoot was the exercise of star clout. His mentor was co-star James Spader. Downey was so thrilled that the studio was putting him up at the famed Sportsmen’s Lodge, he “didn’t care if the elevator smelled like urine because I was in Hollywood. The first day Spader came to the production office, he said, ‘You’ve got to get out of there,’ and brought me over to the Chateau Marmont. From that minute on, I had it together—The Chateau, Fred Segal—and there I was, a young actor in L.A. All I needed was an apartment on Beachwood and some red furniture.”

The red furniture came, too—with movie money rolling in. “I used to just carry all my money on me all the time. I bought stuff for friends. Now I look back and go, ‘I’ve made that much money and I don’t have any saved?’ What the fuck is going on? I have a car, a house, a bunch of nice clothes, tons of music equipment, toys and guns.” Real guns? “Just one by the bed for any of those late-night stalkers who bought the map.”

After making new fans and lots of money doing True Believer and Chances Are with co-stars whose names screamed “Wait for the video,” Downey took on Air America, a Tom Cruise reject, in which he looked puffy and brain dead. At Cannes to promote the mess, he was downing cappuccino with a friend when Arnold Schwarzenegger, with cigar and wife in tow, hulked over to his table and boomed, “Rob, this is Maria. Maria, this is Rob Lowe.” To worsen matters, a critic wrote that Downey had replaced Rob Lowe as “the male Ali MacGraw.” Mention this to Downey and he’s all over you. “What is Ali MacGraw? Was she the worst in movies? Was she bad?” Willing to play straight for the sake of a response, I explain that MacGraw was once Someone Important’s darling who, as an actress, made great set dressing. “Oh,” says Downey, pretending to be sussing all this out, “so, he was saying I was good-looking? Does he miss me? Would he like to buy me something?” No, Robert, you know that he was calling you a bimbo. Drawing himself up, Downey says, shuddering, “Are you insinuating that I got a bad review? There’s no one that can act better than me. There’s no one that will go places that I will go.”

Downey, the jokester, finally cops to his revulsion for Air America: “It was a tossup whether to go see Diane Schuur at the Pantages, or go to the opening of Air America. I knew [Shuur] was only going to be there for two nights, but I thought, ‘Hey, that could happen with the movie, too.’” Warming to his theme, Downey says that the movie “represented making a film industrially, with little revolution—or revelation. The frustration I felt affected me literally—chest pains and stuff, in those sections of your body where energy gets pent up, it was like, I CAN’T STAND THIS.” As is his current wont, Downey ascribes cosmic implications to this personal and professional nightmare. “I needed to have a frustrating experience making the kind of movie I thought I was supposed to do to let me know the kind of movies that I’m going to do. It’s such a roundabout way to get where you think you want to go. But then, that presupposes that I know where I want to go. I don’t. I just know how I want to feel when I’m getting there: excited.”

Oedipal as it may be , Robert Downey Jr is way more famous than Robert Downey Sr. Such a latter-day effort as the recent Too Much Sun, sonny’s third movie for pop, has not redressed that imbalance. Father and son live two blocks apart, in the high-end Hollywood Hills, and Sr. “slightly in the flats,” as his son puts it. Their relationship is “good for the last few years,” now that there are “fewer parts of me that are shut down to how your father’s penis controls you.” Chortling, he says, “I’ve started realizing how we’re a lot more alike. We don’t get certain things. He’s like, ‘Well, we’ll just do this movie with, say him and like he’ll produce it and we’ll get the video rights and just show it.’ And I’m like, ‘Dad, we have to think this through.’”

Almost as if on cue, the waiter yells up from the main dining area, “Robert, you just got a ticket on your car.” Downey thanks the waiter for telling him, gives a fuck-it shrug, then moves on to discussing his future plans. “This year...” becomes the leitmotif that begins such sentences as “... I really want to start making a change ...” and “... I want to try standup comedy ...” In a rare, welcome expression of self-doubt, he allows: “I’ve really been a pinch-hitter so far. I can count the stuff that I’ve liked so far because they’re just scenes, which scares me. I don’t think people are aware what I’m capable of in this industry.” As he excitedly begins to detail his strategies for rectifying that situation, the waiter again hollers up to Downey: his car is about to be towed.

When we meet again days later, Downey bops into a crowded Westside health restaurant wearing a t-shirt with Interview scrawled across it, shades, dark slacks, a few days’ stubble, and a finger splint [more about that later]. I mention that I just noticed him streak past in a crimson Carrera 2 that practically screams “Fresh off the showroom floor.” Wait, wasn’t his vehicle of choice last week the earlier, beloved black BMW L6 635 CSI? “I traded it in yesterday,” he explains, airily. Too many tickets? “No,” he says, suppressing giggles. “It’s just what I wanted, you know? Well, actually, I wanted a black one, but they didn’t have one on the lot. My father calls and says, ‘Robert, you didn’t own the car you traded in.’ I thought I’d paid it all off, but I guess I hadn’t. I earned it. I just don’t own it. And I go, ‘Oh, I see, do they mind?’ So, now, I have to have to take the money they gave in the trade-in and pay off the car that I traded in.”

Downey-isms like that one help explain recent attempts at more responsible career management as Jill Greenbaum, a friend who now functions as his fiercely protective, motherly assistant. But whither Loree Rodkin, the ubiquitous manager so many other Young Hollywood household names? “We’re just not in business anymore, it wasn’t [anything] particular with her, it’s just that there wasn’t really any other business things for her to do. It’s always strange in a business relationship because no one’s the enemy and no one’s wrong. Sometimes things just live out their span. It’s alright that everything ends. It’s about the validity of the experience.”

And his new assistant, who once worked for Dustin Hoffman? “She’s unruly,” he says, mugging, with grudging affectation. “She’s like, ‘I’m not going to run your fucking errands.’ I need to set boundaries with her so that I don’t character assassinate her when I’m not with her. This is a horribly egotistical analogy, but it’s like training your dog not to piss on your bed. You get things set up for two weeks of training, so that you don’t have to beat the fucking shit out of the dog ten times a year. I need to do that in most areas of my life. Boundaries, man. It’s fucking boundary time.”

Although he observes that it is “really hard not to like me because whatever’s not likable isn’t really out for guests,” deep down on some primitive, Downey-centric level, the actor says he is beginning to understand he “must learn tact, diplomacy.” He rationalizes having been turned down for roles. Edward Scissorhands? “Going from Air America into three months of prosthetics would have been too symbolic, like, ‘Let’s see how else I can constrict myself?’” White Palace? “I was fucking petrified. I tested [with Susan Sarandon] but instead of using the nervousness, I held onto the shame of what was going on inside without shot-putting into where I wanted to go.” Again, the cosmic law according to Downey: “There’s a certain trust I have that what’s mean to come to me does. There’s times that I’ve felt myself enter onto that freeway of competition and psychologically, it’s just terrifying, filled with paranoia and the presupposition that everything you get is at the expense of someone else not getting it. Then, there’s the smarminess of knowing that someone’s shooting a movie that I turned down. But then, I’m sure people turned down Air America. That could fucking on and on.”

Now that he has been meeting producers and directors on new projects, he finds that even killer charm wears thin. “People are terrified of getting down in a room to where you can’t just push a project around like a dog pushing poop on a sidewalk—nosing at it, potentially to eat it at any moment. People don’t really want to jump into the process and see what comes up for them. What scares people about me more than anything is else is that I don’t care if the film actually comes out or not. I’m interested in the process.”

Recently, Downey failed to land a movie project he really got up for, Three of Hearts, about a male escort who comes between a lesbian couple. Unpaid and unasked, Downey says he completely rewrote the script outline. “Look, I said, ‘Let’s be responsible to the gay community, but let’s also shock them out of thinking that a lesbian would never sleep with this guy. That’s bullshit. Most lesbian women I know have a guy that they have slept with or sleep with now and then. I said, ‘Let’s go beyond the righteousness of “a gay woman would,” to “a person would.” Why not have the male escort and the lesbian have a kid together?’ They said, ‘Ohhhh, that’s another can of worms.’ Well, call me crazy guys, but I kind of like to open a can of worms when I’m doing a movie.”

Apparently, Downey had been opening cans of worms on the project all along. During a production meeting, he confronted one of the producers by asking: “‘Are you gay? Do you like the idea of another man’s hand on your penis? Do you like the idea that everyone is bisexual?’ And they go, ‘Oh! OH! OHHHHHHHHHH!!!,’—every six minutes the would like blow up!” Downey wanted to pattern his portrayal after Montgomery Clift; the producers were thinking more along the lines of James Dean. “I said, ‘Well, Dean was kind of a speedy bisexual. And the producers went, ‘Funny, Robert. More coffee?’”

If Downey’s version of the movie would not have played anywhere but big cities, at least no one could have accused him of playing it safe. “Given the opportunity, there’s nothing of myself that I won’t expose,” he says, rubbing his hands through his locks. “I think a lot of it is sexual. I don’t have any hang-ups about ‘guy’ stuff, you know? It’s a very homophobic business. I know gay people in positions of power. A. everybody knows. B. it shouldn’t matter. I tell them, ‘You’re already where you want to be, it’s going to affect you one way or another.’”

Since Downey is handing out bromides like Dr. Ruth, what about rumors—despite liaisons with a female juggler studying circus at NYU and his present, longtime live-in relationship with Sarah Jessica Parker—that his own sexual predilections run beyond the straight and narrow? “Although I guess, at least in my actions, I’ve been heterosexual, I think ‘heterosexuality’ and ‘homosexuality’ are overspecifications. A lot of my peer group think I’m an eccentric bisexual, like I may even have an ammonia-filled tentacle somewhere on my body. That’s okay. Being relaxed about sexuality is something you’re born with. It’s just part of your personality before you show up. Sometimes I’ll be with Parker and I’ll just say, ‘She’s a girl and I’m a guy.’ Those are just words. It’s so funny because some parts of our relationship are so completely the opposite. In the kitchen, she’s more masculine and I’m like, ‘Show me how to do things.’ I saw Shirley MacLaine’s show and there’s something about her that reminds me of a young boy scout and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s a well-rounded person.’ Cary grant was very feminine, even though he’s completely charming.” He adds in a booming authoritatively macho voice: “And acceptable.”

So Downey has never been with a guy? “Not sexually,” he answers, then hisses, laughing: “How dare you? If I had, I wouldn’t want to say it because I wouldn’t want a studio to think I sucked dick for beer money. Or to think that I was less capable of portraying someone who needed to be very masculine.” Changing the subject, I ask Downey about the finger splint on his hand. “A friend of mine and I played racquetball and he was walking up the stairs in front of me—speaking of if I’d ever been with a man—” Downey cocks his head, stares off, and rubs his chin, musing, “Did my cousin suck my dick when I was five? Shit, you know that therapy might be a better idea than I thought.” Returning to his anecdote, he continues: “Anyway, my friend was walking up a flight of stairs in front of me—I had just beat him three games in a row, which I usually don’t—and I wanted to literally put my fingers so far into his ass that they would need to be excavated. There would need to be a dig. As it turned out, he was probably wearing some Kevlar boxers or something because I fractured the shit out of my finger.” Even Dr. Ruth would leave that one to Freud.

Will Downey and Parker, who keep a perfect house with lots of deco furniture, pink bedroom walls, and a red lacquered baby grand, get married? He shakes his head no. “Relationships go through stuff. We’ve been together since we were so young that I think we’re just starting to find ourselves. Part of everyone wants to live alone and then part of you says, ‘Nothing better’s going to happen than this.’ We’re both growing up a lot. We’re sticking it out.”

What Downey really wants to do now is develop. To help himself decide on whether he is “more of a character actor or a song-and-dance man, a writer, a director,” he is piecing together with a partner his own projects—on his own timetable. “Part of me is really lazy. A lot of my peers, whatever they’re driven by—resentment, motivation, both—I can’t be bothered with. Like, to get up at eight and read the trades? But, about a year ago, I realized that I’d been in enough films where the story didn’t work to know why. I don’t need to go to ‘How to Make a Script Great’ classes to know that it’s simple: you set it up and pay it off and, like, make it interesting.” Oh, so, that’s what Robert Towne and Nicholas Towne spend months doing for about a zillion dollars a pop. Thanks, Robert. “Writing is probably what I want to wind up doing. My dad has always considered himself primarily, a writer. It’s really hard, except when it comes, it’s like channeling.”

Perhaps his meditations are to be held accountable for his choice of projects: a science fiction tale, and a “Chinatown meets The Sting,” based on the true experiences of the guy who drove his car while Downey was making True Believer in San Francisco. He is already thinking about co-stars. Recently, after being “blown away” by watching Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success, the movie in which the Bronx-born, ‘50s glamour puss won industry respect, he tracked down the 66-year-old actor. If Downey were on the prowl for mentors, he could not have chosen more aptly. Curtis has survived being a reigning teen movie idol of the ‘50s, fighting for critical acclaim and fighting off emotional problems, big time substance abuse, and recovery. “People have said that I remind them of him,” Downey explains. “The minute I talked with him there was this understanding that, okay, there’s going to be a transference thing here. I almost felt like saying, ‘Hi, I’m the new you.’”

Having also recently spent time “doing Western saddles by day and Beluga by night” at the Utah ranch of his Air America producer Dan Melnick, another mentor, Downey allows the common ground between him and Curtis that he feels comfortable discussing is his Jewishness. “I’m really starting to get in touch with this Jewish thing,” he explains. “I’ve always felt I’m not Italian, I’m not Irish, I’m not Jewish, I’m just me—which is good in some ways. I looked at a picture of a friend’s father, a Jewish guy around in the ‘50s, and I thought, ‘My god, that looks like my grandfather,’ who looks like my father, who I guess I look like.”

Some would mark as a comedown [or is it a comeuppance?] Downey’s next role, “a young prick producer in Armani suits,” in Soapdish, an ensemble satire directed by Michael Hoffman on the world of daytime TV sob stories. This time, the picture doesn’t rise or fall on his charisma; he just has to steal it from such co-stars as Sally Field, Kevin Kline, Whoopi Goldberg and Carrie Fisher. “I want to take a modern-day Mephistopheles kind of angle on it,” he says of the role. “I want to make him more likable than I am, which is pretty hefty. I make the mistake of stepping down to characters as opposed to shooting up. It’s an ego thing to think, ‘This character is a little faction of me, a little of that, but not endowed with any of the things that make me me.’ This time, I want to make people uncomfortable liking this guy, knowing that underneath, he really is still an asshole.” Which is as perceptive a comment on his rakish appeal Robert Downey Jr is ever likely to make.

To Downey, the future’s so bright, he’s got to wear shades. “I’ve just gotta show up. It would be really nice to be in a great film, but it’s not time yet. If I ever wind up being in a great film, it’ll mean so much more to me now. But I know this: I’m going to get much better.”