This “Iron Man” has gone from felon to family man.
Robert Downey Jr. is the picture of a happy daddy in Vanity Fair, lounging in a classic set of wheels with son Exton, 2.
But the 49-year-old Marvel movie star opens up in the magazine’s October issue about his troubled past — and its impact on his growing family.
“Pick a dysfunction and it’s a family problem,” says the actor, whose drug addiction landed him in the slammer in 1999.
And now drugs have come back in his life — with the June arrest of his son Indio, 20, on felony possession charges.
“He’s his mother’s son and my son, and he’s come up the chasm much quicker than we did,” Downey says.
Now the dad of two boys is expecting a girl with his film-producer wife, Susan.
Downey, meanwhile, does admit to a new addiction — car collecting — a habit he picked up playing billionaire playboy Tony Stark.
The Ride of His LifeAfter an epic drama of destruction and redemption—worthy of, say, a Marvel super-hero—Robert Downey Jr. is figuring out what he’s learned. Exhibit A, in theaters this month: The Judge, the debut feature from the production company Downey has started with his wife, Susan. At the Malibu home he shares with her, their son, and (soon) their daughter, the world’s highest-paid star talks with Rich Cohen about his lowest point, his genetic legacy, and the new aphrodisiac in his life.
The Ride of His Life
- Every now and then, you just need to ride. I’m shotgun with Robert Downey Jr., the world’s highest-paid actor, strapped in the passenger seat of his black ‘65 Corvette, which, top down, flashes through the sparse weekday traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, Point Dume jutting into the sea. He’s talking about a special afternoon, years ago, during the filming of Up the Academy, a classic bit of late-70s raunch directed by his father, Robert Downey Sr. “Salina, Kansas, that’s where we were shooting,” says Jr., lingering on the word “Salina,” with its resonance of an older, purer America. “I had a little Honda scooter in Salina, a tiny thing, not even a motorcycle, because I wasn’t old enough to drive, and one day, a girl in the movie, Stacey Nelkin, a natural beauty with an unbelievable rack, asked me to ride her from the set back to the hotel where we were staying, and she got behind me, and snuggled up and pressed against me the whole way. I won’t say it made me want to be an actor, but that ride did change my life. Utterly and completely.”
Downey, 49, in sunglasses and baseball hat, oblivious to the look that registers on the face of each driver he leaves behind—son of a bitch, I’ve just been dusted by Iron Man!—is behaving like a movie star. Which is a good thing. For a while back there, in case you weren’t paying attention, he wasn’t a movie star. He was a convict, or, to quote Hank Williams, a number, not a name. Inmate P50522. A cog in the penal system. After a succession of arrests (getting wasted, getting busted, ditching rehab), he’d been sent to the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison, in Corcoran, California. High minimum-security.
- But this was Robert Downey Jr., meaning that the time in stir was, for him, more productive than 10 semesters with Strasberg. Not only did it afford him a helpful glimpse of his professional mortality, it put him in touch with the bedrock truth, aged him like leather, lending his work, which has always been prized, a new depth. You enjoy him as you enjoy middle-aged, post-Ava Gardner Sinatra. It’s not just the song you hear, but the entire life, the story of the man who’s been up and down and is up again: riding high in April, shot down in May, back on top in June. If you watch the movies he’s made since regaining his freedom, you realize that the best of them play as retellings of his own story: death and rebirth, a journey through a nighttime world, redemption. The prime example is Iron Man, mega-hit and sequels, which is tabloid Downey turned into parable: Tony Stark, a billionaire industrialist, a man of private jets, drunken sprees, supermodels, is led, by his arrogance, down the wrong path. His car is set upon by terrorists, just as the Malibu sheriffs once set upon another car in the hills. He makes a run for it, in his suit, but is caught, shackled, beaten, and confined to a cave where the only natural thing to do is die. But he doesn’t die. He’s rejuvenated. He comes out like a man from a cannon, in a suit of armor, devastating his enemies. He’s returned to his old life, only now, like a hero in a folktale, understands it for the first time.
“Job one is get out of that cave,” Downey told me. “A lot of people do get out but don’t change. So the thing is to get out and recognize the significance of that aggressive denial of your fate, come through the crucible forged into a stronger metal. Or whatever. But I don’t even know if that was my experience. It’s funny: five years ago, I would’ve made it sound like I’m conscious of my own participation in seizing the similarities. But so many things have become less certain. I swear to God. I am not my story.”
