Iron Man star is comeback king

May 2 2008 by Rob Driscoll, Western Mail

FIVE years ago, the only headlines Robert Downey Jr was making were about him getting arrested for drug possession.

Now he’s the superstar headlining the new season’s first major Hollywood blockbuster – Iron Man. And the only drug in the building is success.

As billionaire playboy and genius weapons designer Tony Stark – the suave alter-ego of the movie’s eponymous, Marvel Comics superhero – Downey Jr oozes nothing but cool, class and confidence.

His real-life story is quite possibly the kind of heroic turnaround tale that could make another Tinseltown fable. For now, though, Downey Jr is revelling in his own resurgence – and talks about it with refreshingly realistic candour.

“Tony Stark offered me the chance of a lifetime,” says the 43-year-old actor, almost relishing the drama.

“The people who made this movie said they were going to screen-test some people, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s how I got Chaplin – maybe this will work again.’ If you’re going to spend a hundred million bucks on a movie, why not see who works?”

Chaplin, the 1992 biopic about the London- born film comedy giant directed by Richard Attenborough, earned Downey Jr an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, and the oft-quoted tag “greatest actor of his generation”. A few years later he was in career burn-out, thanks to his drug addiction and long recovery in rehab.

This time around, one swiftly gets the impression he’s not about to mess up. Older and wiser, for sure, Downey Jr also has the grace not to wallow in self-pity, or any delusions about the movie industry’s unforgiving nature.

Moreover, he’s acutely aware of the neat ironies offered by his new character(s). Sharp-suited arms dealer Tony Stark likes big weapons and fast women, and seems to have misplaced his confidence, so it makes sense that the man who steps both into his suit of armour and his role as superhero has grappled with vice.

“I’m not the superhero type,” says Tony Stark at one point in the movie. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes, some of them publicly.”

The parallels with Downey Jr’s life are only too apparent. Put that to the man himself, and he smiles.

“At some point, there are going to be obvious questions of art imitating life and all that,” he says. “For me, I just call it a $165m catharsis.”

One suspects that’s the ball-park figure of the film’s budget, but however much it cost, the main money was always going to be on the lead actor, and if the film’s director Jon Favreau ever considered another for the title role, he’s not letting on.

“Robert Downey Jr wanted to play Tony Stark as much as I wanted him to play the character,” says Favreau. “True, he wasn’t the most obvious choice from a studio’s point-of-view, but Marvel gave me the freedom to cast the best person for the role.”

For the uninitiated, Iron Man tells the story of how industrialist Stark’s carefree lifestyle is forever changed when his convoy is attacked and he is held hostage by insurgents.

Stark uses his intellect and ingenuity to build a suit of armour that keeps him alive and enables him to escape captivity. Throw into the equation bad guy Obadiah Stane (a bald and bearded Jeff Bridges), Stark’s longtime, lovestruck assistant Pepper Potts (a high-heeled Gwyneth Paltrow) and his trusted sidekick Rhodey (Terrence Howard), and you have the perfect comic-book mix – especially when Stark develops and refines an advanced suit of armour that gives him superhuman strength and the power to fly.

For New York-born Downey Jr, the chance to play Stark and slip into the red and gold armour was a childhood dream come true.

“I’m an American,” he beams. “I love Marvel Comics and I grew up reading Iron Man and Spider-Man.”

As he approaches middle age, Downey Jr must be positively thrilled to be fit enough to play a superhero. He looks convincingly buff and toned on screen and his days of pre-production included an intense regime of weight-training and martial arts to prepare him for the physical demands of the role.

“About a year ago I decided that I really wanted to put on some size,” observes Downey. “I felt that if I was ever going to do a movie like Iron Man, I had to do it quickly before it became embarrassing being the guy in tights with the flabby body.

“I trained a lot, because if you’re 22, or even 32, you train for six weeks and you look good for six months. I trained for six months and looked good for about six seconds.

“It was really about survival for me, and all the hard work in pre-production wound up giving me the strength to do the movie.”

He views the comic book movie as a kind of arrival after the past few years of lead roles in movies like The Singing Detective, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Zodiac, all of which had cinematic pedigree and cult status, but little in the way of large audiences.

“I’ve been in big movies before, and never had a problem,” he says.

Off camera, Downey Jr is similarly together and at peace with the world, happily married (for almost two years) to producer Susan Levin, and enjoying a good relationship with Indio, his 14-year-old son from a previous marriage.

Mention his self-destructive past, and he merely reminds the room that he has moved on with his life. Life on the big screen is his new obsession.

And Iron Man may well kick-start its own franchise. Rumour has it that the character, played by Downey Jr, makes a guest appearance in The Incredible Hulk remake, as part of Marvel Studio’s attempt to depict the “Marvel universe” on screen.

“You’ll just have to wait and see,” says the man.

In control and loving it.

Iron Man opens today