Institute for Robert Downey Jr Studies > Required Reading

Robert Downey Jr: The Second Greatest Actor in the World

The back-deck view from the A-List is quiet and spectacular. That’s the monstrous ivory Getty Center standing mid ground, and through the haze across the San Fernando Valley, the mountains. There’s a woman taking a gentle dip in a pool beyond the far side of the deck, her head bobbing in silent profile.

Here the root beer is microbrewed; all proceeds go to help shelter dogs. The water, an advanced hydration beverage patented for high levels of stabilized dissolved oxygen, is A-list, too. Luncheon — sliced steak and salmon fillet — is being prepped by the chef, Louise, whose shortcake-and-cream dessert will be gluten-free.

Is this heaven, or Pacific Palisades?

I am not making fun. I want to stay here, live here, curl up on the bench and snooze the afternoon away. The root beer is frosty and delicious. The woman in the pool is standing now, shoulder-deep, her back turned, talking on the phone; too soft to hear, her voice floats on the late-summer breeze, hidden by birdsong. Sun-kissed, my tape recorder shines, waiting for our host.

Our host is in a meeting, in the house; the A-list means the meetings come to you. A few moments more and time will jerk forward again, this blissful silence will flee in holy terror, and Robert Downey Jr. will come, calling me the name that only he has ever called me — dude — and I will tell him how happy I am to see him and to see how far he has come since I saw him last.

“Oh, dude,” he’ll say. “It’s so cool. It’s just so gratifying. This morning I was feeling this overwhelming sense of gratitude. I was having an argument with myself, and the thing that came into my head was, If two plus three is five, then five minus three is two — do you fucking get it?”

He gets it, and that’s really all that counts. The last time I spent time with Downey, the Iron Man crew was just building the sets, and he had yet to be — despite his unparalleled chops, and the infamy of his hellride, and the hard labor of recovering himself and his career — the star of a smash hit. The last time, he was nervous, maybe even a trifle frightened by Jon Favreau and Marvel rolling a $140 million pair of bones by casting a fortyish ex-con to star as a second-tier comic-book superhero in the sort of movie he had never made before.

Anxious, too, about being on a real magazine’s cover for the first time in many mug shots, Downey poured forth 47,900 words — the transcript was 127 pages, single-spaced — over three days running.

Relax, I said at one point. We’ve got enough for three cover stories.

“We need ten,” he told me.

Then Iron Man grossed more than half a billion dollars, and Downey, in blackface, stole Tropic Thunder and got nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and now Iron Man 2 is in the can and he just finished a week of London reshoots for Sherlock Holmes — the meeting in the house today is to spitball Sherlock HolmesSherlock 2 — and he’s leaving for Atlanta this week on a four-month shoot for a Todd Phillips comedy called Due Date — and then and then and then?

“The whole pacing thing has come up in front of the review board — and I’m the one who said that if I don’t take a break after Iron Man 2, there is something desperately wrong here. I’m not a guy who in order to be well I need to have one or another carrot in front of me the whole time. I can’t keep going at this stride and be okay — but I can keep checking all the dials. This is a big, glorious impasse — but Mama needs a new pair of shoes, dude.”

Truly?

“Yes. Absolutely. But Mama needs a new pair of shoes, not a heart transplant and a face-lift.”

Surely not a face-lift. Mama, chair of the review board, is Susan Levin Downey, Downey’s wife, a chestnut-haired beauty from Chicagoland who came west for film school and became a heavy-hitting producer and the heart that beats in Downey’s chest right next to his.

“There’s no understanding for me of the bigger picture in real time in a hands-on way without her. Because it was the perfect, perfect, perfect matching of personalities and gifts.”

So you’ll take a break after Due Date?

“Might be. I’m not sure right now.”

Downey’s forty-four years old, with hard miles on the odometer, a blown gasket or two thwapping in his head, and a lead foot on the gas, still gunning it to make up for all that time he lost.

“I hit my stride later than most folks. A couple years ago, it really was a big old hip-hip-hooray and let’s get somethin’ shakin’ here. Then pfffffff — it reorganized at this higher level, and now there’s more to manage, and more opportunity. And then there’s nothing except the question of pacing — because I can go fast like this for a little while or I can start pacing it down and get where I’m actually supposed to be heading — and it’s really, really elusive.

“I hand it to any and everyone who has made it past their late thirties and has any sense of contentment, because you know so much, and the anxiety can be so overwhelming — and managing the anxiety is a skill set that seems like a menu that changes every day. My insanity is thinking that somehow or another I was responsible — personally, directly responsible — for altering the course of things that have us sitting here on this deck. There’s so many other factors in this — so many other people and past relationships, my kid and my folks, and the centerpiece of it all, Susan. It’s like I know what happened, and I know that I got the ball and ran with it, and hip-hip-hip, and then like they’re saying, ‘Look — before you blow out a knee, we’d like to give you a bunch of endorsements,’ and I go, ‘Great.’

“The truth of the matter is, it’s always been like this. It hasn’t gone up from down; it’s just that it’s finally got wide enough that I can be contained.”

Downey looks past me and spots the woman at the far end of the yard, in the pool.

“Want to see something beautiful, dude?”

Downey watches her for a minute or two without another word. She’s his mom, Elsie, who now lives down the street. She was a cabaret singer and an actress, best known for her work in Robert Downey Sr.’s movies — a trove of outré work, including Putney Swope and Greaser’s Palace, two cult favorites of no wee influence among today’s more daring directors.

This is, in fact, a huge part of Junior’s aesthetic lineage: He grew up in New York City, the hyperkinetic son of a maverick filmmaker who defined commercial success as failure and an actress who sunk her own career into her husband’s and into motherhood.

“What I have from my mom is the very distinct education in not blindly but somewhat wantonly throwing yourself into the work — and being very brave and dedicated. Because that gal sunbathing with her back to us dedicated her life to working in accord with my dad’s vision.

“And speaking of wider, dude — there I am, and it’s Rocky Horror Picture Show, Friday and Saturday night at the Eighth Street Playhouse, and there’s my buddy Frank Hall — who I’ve known since I was five — and there are these kids from a local club calling us Rocky Horror freak-outs, and we get our asses kicked. And there’s my mom, fresh out of doing these movies with my dad, and they’ve broken up, and we’re living in a nasty walk-up place on Forty-eighth and Madison. There we were — there were those times and those trials — and now.

“I look at it like that, like the poles between it. Now I’m not worrying about her, she’s not inundating me, we’re both healthy and happy — and there’s enough space for her to do what she likes to do and me to do what I like to do, and Susan’s doin’ what she wants to do. It’s about so much more than a deck with three different spaces — it’s about something that we’ve been able to figure out, which is tough, which is all these things Western and Eastern civilizations say: ‘This is the pyramid, and if you have this, you are closer to God.’ And the closer you get to that little capstone, the more dissatisfying it is — because it’s what you’ve known all along.”

Damn. We’re suspended somewhere between El Camino Real and Kapilvastu, motes drifting in the beam of light sprung from Vishnu’s palm, when Louise brings lunch.

Downey wants a root beer, too.

All proceeds go to shelter dogs, I say.

“Is that true?” he asks Louise. “Stop buying that garbage. And I want a three-legged poodle with cataracts over here tomorrow — can we arrange that? I gotta keep the image up.”

The back-deck house in Pacific Palisades turns out to be a rental until the end of November — another in a series of rented houses going back to the bad old days, when Downey’s first marriage fell apart and all the dollars went up in thick white smoke. Nobody in show business ever talks about their own money, so when Downey tells me we’re heading to an undisclosed location and jumps into a black Jetta station wagon — with me trailing in my rental unit — I figure maybe Marvel’s paying him in licorice and Spideybux until the bookkeepers can no longer hide the profits.

I frankly can’t resist: Let me guess your lease, I say — we’re in visual and cell-phone contact as we wend our way through Santa Monica — $379 a month?

“Shall I tell you the joys of the Jetta station wagon, dude? It’s low-profile. It’s got it all. The instrumentation, while firmly rooted in the twenty-first century, could easily be mistaken for 1993. The steering wheel has nothing but the steering wheel.”

Yeah, yeah — but what do you drive for fun?

“I just realized — this is my old stomping grounds, when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. The first guy who ever knocked me out with a left hook — Todd Bryant — lived right there, the street on your right, Marguerita.

“You see the sign that says CLEANER BY NATURE, there on your right? It’s now an eco-friendly dry-cleaning establishment; it was a German delicatessen where, if you were fifteen years old but said that you went to UCLA — and paid cash — you could buy Spaten lager and Grolsch. We would wind up hammered in Douglas Park — then we would enjoy the environs of Jack in the Box afterwards.

“This is home. This Rite Aid on your left, on the far side of Nineteenth Street, used to be a Thrifty’s — and that Thrifty’s was where Lino Bruni, Reed D’Eugenio and I ran — and by the way, I was anything but the brains of the operation — we ran a counter scheme there, where our friends would come in, buy a lawn mower, and we’d ring up thirty cents, and they’d give us five bucks. Which we would spend here, at the now seemingly still open but looking defunct Bagel Nosh that we just passed. The Coffee Bean there has nothing to do with the eighties and therefore I’m going to absolutely discount it.”

Downey’s in full-strobe mode now — right down to spelling his old running buddies’ last names for me. This is where he came to stay with his dad when his old man left New York to bang his barbarian head against the studios’ gates — and where young Bob found his narcotic métier.

“This 7-Eleven on the left is where I was first detained by undercover officers in the mid-nineties who were wondering if my activity, though suspicious, would reveal anything more if they searched my car — they did; they found nothing. And here of course is Zucky’s, where Ramon Estevez — son of and brother to the Estevez-Sheen clan — taught me about punk rock and tap dancing and introduced me to the rigors of various aspects of theater arts — which culminated in my being cast in the Santa Monica High production of Oklahoma!

“I guess I’m talking about those SaMo High years in 1981-82. Then I dropped out — I would’ve been class of ‘83.”

Ever finish?

“I did not — I got my GED in the penitentiary. One block over would be where I got my first DUI — although I didn’t have my license yet. My friend Chris Bell’s mom’s Mercedes suddenly became the object of my affection — I got my hands on the keys, I went driving, I got lost, I pulled over to ask a police officer directions before he pulled me over to ask if I had a license — and I was shortly thereafter in custody.

“Now for the sake of my geographical privacy, I will give no further indication of what landmarks could point to where we’re going, but I will say that we’re heading south to Venice. More shall be revealed — goodbye for now.”

Then my phone rings again.

“By the way, I so didn’t have it in my mind that this would be this travelogue. I feel like I’m doing Gestalt therapy. Like I said — wider. It’s just so nice: Everyone has a story, and the story changes, and the more I can root into the truth of things — it’s so hard — I don’t think anyone ever really puts it all together. But somewhere along the way it all became fused.”

Yo, Sherlock: No shit.

Home. In low-slung Venice, hard by the Pacific, as near to real life as money can buy in Los Angeles — not so far in spirit from the Village of his youth — Iron Man has catapulted Downey back home.

“I’ve been homeless for so long,” he says, without a morsel of self-pity. “I always had a place, and Susan and I have taken great care of each other, but I haven’t had two nickels to rub together for a long, long, long, long time.”

He now has nickels galore. The Jetta turns out to be his son’s first car — Indio Downey just turned sixteen — and Downey has a Bentley. “My door prize after the two-week total of Iron Man proceeds,” he says, sheepishly. “From Marvel. They’re nice people.”

Downey also sports a watch he bought himself — a small Rolex, stainless-steel, he found in a shop in the Hamptons on a trip back east.

“It’s my first nice watch. I got it with Susan — we were hangin’ out on Gwyneth Paltrow’s dime, havin’ a ball. We walked into town and I decided to grab a watch. Dude, I’ve never been a metal-band guy, but when you have a loose one — and by the way, it is vintage, and, of course, it’s a 1980.”

Nice, I say, to have a nice watch.

“You only need one.”

Downey wheels a Bentley and wears a watch and has a home at last — a jaw-dropping triplex, three layers of metal and mahogany, wired as any A-Class office space, all of it hidden behind a warehouse door and stacked above a main street, where the traffic noise mixes with the ploshing of the rooftop pool. One wall of the master bedroom is a window set into the bottom of the freaking pool. And — the piece de resistance — the toilet in the master bath is ... square.

Square! Square! A square crapper!

“Dude, this place is so Austin Powers twenty-first century. I came here this morning having to drop a deuce, and it was a singular and enjoyable experience.”

Then Downey, bless him, bursts into song — the chorus of “Looks Like We Made It,” by Mr. Barry Manilow.

“We took possession yesterday,” he says, walking me through the place floor — “that’s me and little missy’s double office in there” — by floor — “that’s the kid’s room” — by floor. We wind up sprawled across two long couches in some kind of a sunken conversation pit up on the third, fifty or so yards east of the swimming pool. He has some gizmo in his hand that raises the window shades behind us. He looks like sunrise, Christmas morning.

Robert, this is one of the greatest places I’ve ever seen.

“We could not believe it. Could not believe it. How was it that I was able to put in a bid on this place — and they accepted it and it didn’t fall out and it went through?

“One thing winds up feeding another. Iron Man wound up leading to so many things for me — and I still, on a lot of levels, have not even begun to process it, but there are artifacts now.”

Artifacts?

“I mean this space we’re in. I felt like it’s an investment in both recognizing how far we’ve come, and also that we’re just at the starting gate of real potential autonomy. I’ve always had a fear of financial insecurity, and for good reason. And I have never found fortune to favor me whether I was in my bravest moment or my darkest cowardice. Until now.

“Suffice to say, dude, I’m not paranoid anymore. I’m not fearful. It’s interesting to be surfing this tremendous crisis of capitalism — and I know there’s a coral reef under me and I don’t want to hang ten, but I do think that when you’re in the pole position, that’s when you try to beat your best personal time. So I really wanted to be aggressive about an artifact.

“But the funny thing is, Susan’s and my lifestyle — as much as it’s about home and creating something warm — it’s still an image thing no matter how you slice it, the same way it’s as much of an ego trip to drive the Jetta as it is the Bentley. One’s a judgment on the other, and one’s a counterjudgment, and God bless the Prius, but that ain’t me.

“I just go, Wait a minute, wait a minute, I’m getting all caught up” — and he drops into the urban rumble of his Tropic Thunder character: “all caught up, man.”

He’s practically flat on his back on the couch, afloat on another cloud of Gestalt.

“I am the sixties — seventies version of that now auto-dial latchkey kid in a neighborhood — Venice, where we are right now, 2009, dusk, about the same as running around the Village in the seventies. I grew up on the streets, and there’s a street right there, a cool street. There’s traffic noise, which to me is a lullaby.

“My whole story — there’s such immense satisfaction to see past that. I found my way out of the woods by a subtler and subtler trail of bread crumbs — now I’m just in the business of the business, and the business of my life, and the mind-blowing opportunities — and if nothing else, dude, I really love the way these ceilings look.”

Is that mahogany?

“It might be. I’m gonna find out.”

It’s lush.

“It is lush.”

A confession: I was making fun before, up top, out on the deck. Three-legged poodle root beer and all, it’s an unthinkably lush life. An artifact can be any object made by human work — a movie, an austerely elegant techno-hipster triplex, even a square crapper. It can serve as evidence of life or one more bread crumb on the long haul homeward, but — and no one knows this better than Downey — you’d better keep it real, deal with pain, and separate the lush from the life, or you can end up in a casket of pure gold before you even know you’re dead.

“I think about the people who have survived things, but they never really survived them — and there’s been evidence of that lately with the passing of DJ AM — just so, so, so strikingly tough to process. I understand why it’s so hard — I’ve been the first-tour grunt bleeding out on the field. If you’re at all sensitive — no matter how much you shore things up and no matter how healthy-minded you are — isn’t it supposed to be the joyful participation in the suffering of mankind?

“It’s in there somewhere, but to me it comes in dribs and drabs — it’s something that I struggle with — the embarrassment at being on the side of the coin that no one else had a problem with when you were tails-down. I’m in this rarefied air, and rarefied air is rarefied because it’s at a certain place for a certain time, and it has a shelf life — and then it goes stale.”

Are you set for life now, moneywise?

“No. But let me put it this way: People who are much smarter than I am tell me, ‘You need to relax — because by any standards, you are someone who should relax.’ And I’m like, ‘Really? Butbutbutbutbut — Ijustwannamakesure, Iwanna, Ineedta, Iwanna,’ and they go, ‘We get it, but will you relax?’

“All that latchkey-kid stuff — ‘Daddy’s leaving and he’s taking the money,’ as me and my friends always say to each other. It covers a lot of bases: ‘Daddy’s leaving and he’s taking the money.’”

I don’t know how many Iron Mans there’re gonna be.

“Me neither.”

It’s unthinkable now without you.

“I feel the same way.”

I don’t know how many you want to do.

“Right.”

And you don’t know what’s going to happen with Sherlock Holmes.

“I don’t.”

Is there a plan?

“There’s a plan,” he says. “What do they say, though — if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plan. What there is is a bumping up of infrastructure so when the plan makes itself known, it doesn’t fall through the cracks — I honestly don’t know what the next marching orders are gonna be from the good-guy Cosmos. Just like this space is about live/work — about pushing the artifact away from narcissism and into productivity, into possibility, into humility, into changing, by taking on less and giving it more or taking on more but doing it less. I will not be able to remain happy and sedate being whatever — being an increasingly hireable actor type. I think the best thing I could do for my soul and my own development would be to direct.

“I’m not sure exactly how things are going to shake out, because it’s really easy for me to do landgrabs with my day job, and I still have a lot of passion for it, but if I had to guess, that would probably be my next move.”

You’re serious?

“Yes. It’s in my blood from my dad and it’s — there are a bunch of other things I’ve always wanted to do that remain very, very much unrequited. And no matter how you slice it, I am still executing the wishes, thoughts, themes, titles, and stories coming from elsewhere. I feel like they’re mine, because I really invest myself in them — but there are some interesting things out there.

“It’s easy when you have a little bit of political and creative sway to talk about the need for a vision for the movie to be created, but it’s another thing to put on those field glasses and be able to call ‘em at eight hundred yards and all that. I think it would be a great lesson in creativity and humility for me.

“The other thing is, I love being part of something that makes other people a bunch of dough. And I don’t need to make nothing but big movies. In fact, if anything I’m probably in danger of wearing out my welcome.”

Never. you’re the best actor in the world, dude. Except for maybe Bill Murray.

“The J. D. Salinger of actors. I love him. Admire him. Envy him. Any movie is different if he’s in it, because he’s fucking Bill Murray, the guy who can change where his eyes are looking and twelve hundred people crack up. There was a time, dude — and we were so fortunate to get Jeff Bridges — but we had entertained, briefly, Bill Murray for Iron Man, for Obadiah Stane, and we were shooting out in Lone Pine, and somebody said they know somebody who knows somebody out in the desert who might be able to get a letter to his box.”

So you’re the second-best actor in the world, dude. I just never heard you talk about doing anything else.

“I used to mention it every five years or so, between public humiliations. So it’s been five years. It’s time.”

And then Downey gets even wider than show business, if such a thing is possible.

“The big unspoken thing here is that we intend to have a family. One reason I’m talking about this thing is — even though it’s a bigger job — if she’s producing and I’m directing, and really, we would probably wind up directing together is the truth. She is so beloved, and she is such a great nurturer of creativity that I have a feeling we’re gonna make a lot folks happy to hang out and come play with us.”

Whoa. Dude, hold up. You want to make a baby, too?

“Hell, yeah. Speaking of artifacts. The ultimate artifact of our love. In a onesie.”