During this time, he was fired off the TV show Ally McBeal and was unable to secure insurance for Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda. What began as a recreational activity - “I used to take drugs after work and on weekends,” he said - turned into a well-publicised meltdown. He was arrested twice after his receiving parole in 2000. Over the next five years, Downey Jr spent several months in different facilities, which culminated in a year-long stint in prison. Before he was sentenced for these crimes, he was found collapsed in his neighbour’s child’s bedroom, unconscious after a bender. mammoth, unquenchable, riotously insatiable.”īut things really unravelled in 1996, when he was pulled over by cops and was found to be carrying large amounts of cocaine, heroin and a. By 1987, he had already had three stints in rehab facilities, and according to that Guardian article, his appetite for illegal substances was, “even by movie industry standards. The actor has said that he was exposed to drugs at a very young age by his father, the filmmaker Robert Downey Sr, who introduced him to cigarettes and pot before he became a teenager. In 1987, he played a drug addicted rich boy in Less Than Zero, a film that earned him excellent reviews and Downey Jr later called his ‘Ghost of Christmas Future.’Ī 2003 Guardian article alluded to this by saying that “for the greater part of the past decade, the focus on him has been fairly evenly split between 1) his reputation as the finest actor of his generation, and 2) his status as the ultimate poster boy for a particularly epic form of Hollywood self-destruction.”ĭowney Jr’s ‘self destruction’ began in the late ‘80s, when he was arrested numerous times for the possession of cocaine, heroin and marijuana. And the story of Iron Man was really the story of Robert’s career.”īut what is the story of Robert’s career? Robert Downey Jr in a still from Less Than Zero. “Certainly by studying the Iron Man role and developing that script I realised that the character seemed to line-up with Robert in all the good and bad ways. “Everybody knew he was talented,” Favreau recounted in a later interview to a Texas radio station.

Ten years later, Downey Jr will apparently be paid close to $100 million for Avengers: Infinity War, the latest in the now 19 film-strong MCU. But director Jon Favreau fought for him every step of the way, convinced that he was the only man for the job. In the mid-2000s, when the film was initially being planned and the ambitious Marvel Cinematic Universe was but a glimmer in producer Kevin Feige’s eye, Downey Jr was a star well past his prime, having developed a reputation as an unreliable screw-up with a history of drug abuse.

Marvel did not want to cast Robert Downey Jr in the role of Tony Stark in the first Iron Man.

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