Here's part of the article on Robert Downey Jr., written by Matthew Klam. I'd post the rest, but it's 11 pages long on GQ's website, so if you're really interested you can just read it there.
Quote:
The Man in the Irony Mask
Monday at 10 a.m., Jimmy the butler answers the door of Robert Downey Jr.’s four-bedroom Brentwood mansion. “Hey, dude,” he says, “he’ll be down in a minute.” Downey lives on a quiet cul-de-sac in a not-so-flashy modern house he leases with his second wife, the former Susan Levin—a short, dark-haired workaholic movie producer. The maid finishes the breakfast dishes. Jimmy goes back to counting herbal pills at the counter and placing them into little Baggies labeled with the days of the week. The same type of nicotine inhaler that John Cusack is using to quit smoking on the set in Vancouver sits ready for Downey to try, at the urging of Susan, who’s in Canada now, producing two movies. There are photos of Downey and Susan taped above the refrigerator: with President Bush and Mrs. Bush; with Tom Cruise, Mrs. Cruise, and Suri in a group hug on-set in Hawaii. The week’s schedule, in brightly colored fonts for easy reading, hangs from the bulletin board—yet another magazine interview tonight, rerecording dialogue tomorrow, a shooting day on Wednesday—along with Downey’s son’s soccer-playoff schedule.
The house is made up of small round and asymmetrical rooms, flying beams, and plenty of glass. Out back a Ping-Pong table sits beside the swimming pool. In the living room, classy modern art hangs on the walls, stuff by El Lissitzky and Alexander Ross. Iron Man movie paraphernalia covers the fireplace mantel; a red-and-gold statue of Iron Man is the centerpiece on the dining-room table. A life-size Iron Man helmet rests on a shelf by the stairs.
Twenty-one years after Less Than Zero, fifteen years after an Oscar nomination for Chaplin, twelve years after his first arrest, seven years since his last arrest, having taken some smaller and supporting roles lately, as well as some weird jobs, and mastered each of those, always magnetic and riveting, regardless of the project—well, now, finally, Downey will headline a blockbuster, Iron Man, a reported $186 million comic-book-superhero movie directed by Jon Favreau. His Hasbro action figure has just arrived in the mail.
This is the one superhero role Downey was born for. Tony Stark, who inhabits the Iron Man suit, is a womanizing alcoholic genius munitions maker, a grown man who runs a corporation, has deep flaws and a checkered history, who almost has to die before moral inquiry enters his vocabulary. Other than the fancy suit, Tony Stark has no special powers; he’s not a man of steel. Like Dick Cheney, he wears a pacemaker. Iron Man was a job Downey wanted so badly. “He tried and tried and tried and got shot down,” Jon Favreau told me, “until finally he went on-camera”—only the second screen test of his career (the first was Chaplin)—“and all argument ended.” The film also stars Gwyneth Paltrow as his sweet secretary, Virginia “Pepper” Potts, Jeff Bridges as his business partner/nemesis, Obadiah Stane, and Terrence Howard as Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes, Stark’s BFF.
Jimmy is at the refrigerator checking to see if the strawberries are still good when Downey appears, his salt-and-pepper hair closely cropped for The Soloist, the movie he is currently shooting, about a schizophrenic homeless musician who dreams of reaching the big time. Downey plays Steve Lopez, the L.A. Times writer who finds the musician, played by Jamie Foxx, and upends his life trying to help him reveal his talent to the world.
Downey smiles and thanks me, and then I thank him, Oh no, thank you! for agreeing to put up with the indignity of a daylong rectalscopic interrogation. He wears baggy pants, orange high-tops, and an orange T-shirt that reads racquetball excuse shirt: sweat got in my eyes, my shoes were untied, my foot slipped, he got in the way…: a little bit of self-mockery to break the ice. Having spent the past ten or so years of interviews explaining and apologizing, his T-shirt now knows the drill and beats him to it.
Downey asks Jimmy to make a protein shake for him, for later (“Hey, sorry to put this on you, dude”), and Jimmy goes past him to the pantry, head down. Then they discuss the strawberries, standing at the refrigerator door. They move around each other the way two people do who spend all their time together, each operating as good-naturedly as possible, having learned to ignore the unspeakably annoying things the other one does. There is something slightly ridiculous about the gravity with which they’re eyeing the strawberries, although it’s good to remember while in the kitchen of a reformed addict that food and mealtimes and daily routines are as important as the boring-sounding aphorisms that guide him; these vital touchstones are part of what now moors him to the planet.
This is as close as I’ll come to witnessing any personal conflict in Downey’s life, conflict between him and Jimmy, or between him and his son or ex-wife, or with Susan while talking to her on the phone. The analogue of the protein-shake/strawberry dustup from Downey’s former life might be an episode Matt Palmieri told me about in which Palmieri, a close friend for going on sixteen years, “had to crash down a door of his, and I had to wrestle him, grab him, and punch him and throw him over my back and carry him and stuff him in a car and fly him, rent a jet and fly him, to a facility, and I remember at the time saying, ‘If you fight back, I’m gonna slug you again.’ ” The old Downey was better at staging household drama.
Standing there in his kitchen, I feel like I’ve known him for years. His private life, his tortured psyche, have been so familiar for so long that I almost feel like I’m visiting a family member, one who went crazy last Thanksgiving and tried to f--- the turkey, but is fine now and applying to law school. Downey goes on thanking me for driving all the way across town to meet here at his house. He’s five ten and has good posture, these big eyes, and a warm grin, but the charisma switch is off. In person, without a character to inhabit, he is entirely comfortable in his own skin and might as well be standing there in his pajamas. From this moment until about eight o’clock at night, he’ll remain chatty, steady, welcoming, offering algae drinks and espresso, not showing any of the inner turmoil that drove his chronic self-destruction, and will seem happy to match my starstruck excitement with his own zest for human connection. At some point in the afternoon, he will punch me in the face, but as I look back on it now it was probably my fault. And anyway, it was a privilege.
Such a handsome man.
GQ!!!
Thank you thank you thank you
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