Robert Downey Jr’s Hollywood career is a tale for the ages and one of the greatest comebacks ever. The iconic nature of his most famous character, Tony Stark, however, has caused a misguided perception of who Downey is as a real-life person.
“I ain’t him, I’ll tell you that flat out,” he told Vanity Fair on the set of Avengers: Endgame as part of their cover story with a career retrospective. “There’s always a bit of a burn-off period when they run out of call sheets for me in any of these movies, and I go back to being a little bit more of just…I’m just a f**king actor. I’m just a guy–who does have a very interesting past, who does not regret it, who wished to shut the door on it. I think that that translates.”
From being a teen heartthrob and joining the SNL cast, albeit briefly, to getting an Oscar nomination at the age of 27, his resume is one of the most eclectic of his generation. From there, his trials and tribulations with his drug addiction are notoriously infamous, and he was deemed radioactive for almost a decade.