Robert Downey Jr. Says His Great Marvel Acting Went Unnoticed Because of the Genre; Rob

March 2024 · 5 minute read

Robert Downey Jr. appeared on Rob Lowe’s “Literally!” podcast and said that his run as Tony Stark/Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe marked some of the best acting of his career, but “it went a little bit unnoticed because of the genre.” The Oscar nominee played the character for 11 years, exiting the MCU in 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame.”

Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said last month that he won’t be asking Downey Jr. to return to the MCU as to preserve Tony Stark’s emotional ending (“We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way,” he said), but that hasn’t stopped rumors from circulating that Marvel desperately wants Iron Man back to help restore the MCU to its glory days. The franchise hit a box office rough patch last year with flops such as “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “The Marvels,” the latter of which is the lowest-grossing MCU movie of all time.

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Downey Jr.’s phone started ringing during the recording of the “Literally!” podcast, prompting Lowe to say: “Is that some Marvel shit? Are you going to break some stories here?”

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“Not just yet,” Downey Jr. responded.

“You know what I say. That phone is going to ring, baby, and I want to be on that call. I want to be negotiating for you,” Lowe added about Downey Jr.’s potential offer to return to Marvel. “I know what your deal is. Here’s what you do. You go, ‘I’ll come back and I’ll play Tony Stark for you guys again since you fucked everything up. But I want a gazillion dollars. I know what that number should be, and I want first dollar gross of every ensuing movie. That’s what I would do.”

Downey Jr. laughed off Lowe’s pitch and said, “That sounds quite hostile!”

After Downey Jr.’s Marvel run came to an end, he took on the $175 million family tentpole “Dolittle.” It was an infamous box office flop when it opened in January 2020 just before the COVID pandemic and earned some of the worst reviews of the actor’s career. He also produced the film with his wife, Susan Downey, under their Team Downey Productions banner. Downey Jr. told Lowe the movie “just didn’t work,” but he’s humble it knocked him down a bit after Marvel.

“I felt so exposed after being in the cocoon of Marvel where I think I did some of the best work I will ever do, but it went a little bit unnoticed because of the genre,” Downey Jr. said. “[I] did myself a favor, because the rug was pulled so definitively out from underneath me and all the things that I was leaning on as opposed to what my understanding of confidence and security was, boy did they evaporate. And it rendered me teachable.”

Downey Jr. is currently on the Oscar campaign trail for Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” for which he won the Golden Globe for best supporting actor. He’s widely expected to pick up an Oscar nomination for his performance.

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