This weekend was ruled by Marvel Comics gold and red Avenger IRON MAN, and the movie’s success was thanks in no small part to leading man Robert Downey Jr. The actor who has had an extremely varied past both in his personal and private life, is extremely candid when speaking about being involved with a major new franchise and how he thinks elements from the comic books like Tony Stark’s alcoholism should be handled.
“Well, seeing as how I will entirely be calling the shots for IRON MAN two, three and seven; I don’t know,” he laughs. “I think an interesting way to address that would be to do it not in an obvious way. My idea is that it’s like it’s Tony’s fortieth birthday and he’s drinking and having fun and then he’s drinking way too much and it’s not cool anymore and then he thinks he’s just starting to have fun and then he says and does things and experiences things or gets himself trouble with someone who winds up being a nemesis later on. I think it’s better to mythologize something like that. I think that you can actually get more out of it that way, but what do I know.”
IRON MAN isn’t the only superhero movie Downy Jr. is in this summer, he’s also putting in a cameo in the Marvel Studio’s produced THE INCREDIBLE HULK as, and you guessed it, Tony Stark. He wasn’t so keen on doing the cameo and feels like he is owned by the studio in the way that actors used to be owned in the ‘golden age’ of Hollywood.
“So they asked me to go a day in a bar with someone or this and that,” he says. “I was like, ‘Is that what I’m doing? And over here doing a commercial for Audi? Wow. Is that in my contract? It is. I sit on the car? Okay.’ Then it was like, ‘Ed Norton wants you over here.’ I was like, ‘Wow. It’s like I’m a contract player.’ It was because they knew and they put it out there and one person at every table and one person at every place that I go you hear THE INCREDIBLE HULK which is coming out this summer while we’re talking about this.”
Downey Jr. took the researching of his role very seriously and wanted to be able to read each and every piece of IRON MAN material that was available from Marvel Comics, and requested to have it sent to his home.
“At one point I called up Jeremy Latcham who’s a dear friend, he’s Kevin Feige’s assistant at Marvel,” Downey Jr. says. “I said, ‘Hey, can you send me all the IRON MAN stuff?’ He goes, ‘Uh, I’ll send over the” I said, ‘No. I can you send me over all the “Iron Man” stuff that you guys have.’ He goes, ‘Robert, it’s quite a voluminous amount’ I said, ‘Can. You. Send. Me. All. The. IRON MAN. Stuff. That. You. Have? Thank you, if the answer is yes. Check one.’ They sent it all and I was like, ‘I’m not going to get caught flat footed here.’ I can’t tell you that I could repeat it all by rote but every single piece; it was like a pallet from storage.”
Being faithful to the character and making the movie what fans wanted was another part of making the movie a success to the actor. He was extremely insistent that the movie be a direct adaptation of the original comics and returned to the source material whenever any aspect was called into question.
“Yeah, that was super important to us because Tony Stark being faithful to the fans is the best Tony Stark that will ever be in terms of the way it was,” he says earnestly. “I just like this idea too, when there’s so much reference and then you get new people involved and they go, ‘Ah, we don’t need to look at those comic books. Look, the action sequence with the F-22’s –’ I was like, ‘Wait! Whoa! Hi, guys. They spent forty-five years, really smart people, really talented artists, really, really good writers on this. Forty-five years. Don’t you think we can give this forty-five minutes? Don’t you think we have to?’ At a certain point too, what is it called – artistic license is to not realize that what you need is already there. I guess that’s one way to go if you want. I’m really emotional about this because for me, when we were doing CHAPLIN, I was like, ‘You can’t tell his story any better than the way that it really happened.’”
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