From Superhero to Villain: Robert Downey Jr.’s ‘Oppenheimer’ Turn Was Undeniable
After spending a decade-plus confined to the Iron Man suit and the Marvel playground, the man behind Lewis Strauss reminded everyone what he’s capable of: a nervy performance full of pettiness, desperation, and force
“I played a guy named Tony in the MCU for about 12 years,” said Robert Downey Jr. earlier this month at the BAFTAS, where he was accepting the Best Supporting Actor award for his performance in Oppenheimer. “Recently, that dude Chris Nolan suggested I attempt an understated approach as a last-ditch effort to perhaps resurrect my dwindling credibility.”
“That dude” is pure Downey, threading affection through satire like barbed wire: If there’s one filmmaker who doesn’t seem like a dude, it’s Nolan, he of the on-set suit-and-tie directorial style, the man frequently referred to by his own children as “Reynolds Woodcock.” (This clip of Nolan not quite losing himself while watching Eminem at the 2002 MTV Awards is the stuff of legend; it deserves its own oral history.) A-list razzing of this sort doesn’t get much better. But the larger sentiment about Nolan rescuing Downey from his own success couldn’t have been more on point—and is quite frankly meaner than anything Martin Scorsese has ever said about Marvel.
Make the Case: The 2024 Oscar Winners We Want to See
Ringer writers have lots of opinions about the Oscars: Barbie should get Best Adapted Screenplay; Robert De Niro deserves Best Supporting Actor. Follow along as we make our best arguments for the Oscars we want to see ahead of the 96th Academy Awards on March 10!
- Daniel Joyaux: Barbie Turned the Abstract Into a Cohesive Script. It Deserves the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.
- Keith Phipps: Robert De Niro Continues to Evolve, Persevere, and Challenge Himself. He Should Win Another Oscar.
- Adam Nayman: From Superhero to Villain: Robert Downey Jr.’s ‘Oppenheimer’ Turn Was Undeniable
- Paul Thompson: Just Do It Already. Give Bradley Cooper a Damn Oscar.
- Julianna Ress: ‘May December’ Found a Delicate Balance to Tell a Disturbing Tale
Back in 2019, the same year that Tony Stark met his fate at the end of Avengers: Endgame, Downey earned cinephile brownie points for being more conciliatory than most in response to Scorsese’s remarks—an indication that, unlike some of his collaborators, he understood the larger implications at play for cinema. In an interview with Howard Stern, the actor said he welcomed a “different perspective” and issued a slightly sardonic mea culpa about his franchise’s near-monopolistic box office dominance over the past two decades. “There’s a lot to be said for how these genre movies—and I was happy to be part of the ‘problem’ if there is one—denigrated the era, the art form, of cinema,” he said. “And, by the way, when you come in like a stomping beast and you eliminate the competition in such a demonstrative way, it’s phenomenal.”
For an image of that dominance—and Downey’s central role in establishing it—think back to the astonishing scene in Iron Man when a revitalized (and now palladium-powered) Tony Stark lays waste to the terrorists who’d held him hostage, hovering over a war-torn village as an emblem of the American military-industrial complex, a wisecracking one, naturally, with benevolent intentions and perfect aim. In a moment when movies of all kinds were still channeling ambivalence in the wake of 9/11, trying to (super)heroize a guy who’s unilaterally carrying out drone strikes overseas was a tall order. But through a combination of actorly skill and the free-floating, endearing aura he’d cultivated in the aughts as a comeback kid, Downey didn’t just sell the concept: He made it impossible not to buy in. As national allegories go, the parable of a billionaire arms manufacturer who grows a (metaphorical) heart of gold hit the sweet spot between technocratic fantasy and political reality; by the time of the first Avengers movie, Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury was the official authority, but Downey was the top dog, coasting through his scenes on charisma and quietly acting circles around his younger costars—a dynamic that the better series entries mined for comedy and pathos.
That Marvel has seen its critical and commercial fortunes diminish in the wake of Downey’s departure isn’t exactly a surprise. No matter who he was asked to bounce lines off of—from Mickey Rourke to Elon Musk—Downey elevated the games of those around him. Even in a knowingly slight entry like Spider-Man: Homecoming, he was a grounding presence and, humorously, a stand-in for the idea of a studio quality control filter. His above-it-all detachment while mentoring Tom Holland’s up-and-coming Peter Parker is especially funny when he talks about the need to cut costs—do they really need to introduce a cool new costume? How about the kid earns it first?
The joke gets funnier—or more obscene—when you consider that by the time of Endgame, Downey was reportedly raking in $75 million for his time on the movie. Hence the unspoken and borderline self-satirical subtext of the final Avengers outing: that Tony Stark’s death—born, inevitably, of noble self-sacrifice—was at least as ground-shaking as the resurrection of 2 billion civilian (and superhero) casualties. The film’s coda, set at Tony’s funeral, looks both prescient and grimly hilarious in retrospect, with every character in the MCU gathered to pay respects to their departed leader and meal ticket. “We are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again,” Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige said last year. “We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way.”
Certainly, Downey doesn’t seem in a rush to return to the armor-plated sweepstakes: He’s on the verge of winning his first Oscar for Oppenheimer. His role as the scheming D.C. operator Lewis Strauss is hardly his first award-worthy performance, of course. A quick trip through Downey’s filmography reveals a protean talent that initially thrived on the margins—in roles as junkies, hustlers, and hyper-verbal self-promoters—before his off-screen exploits began to overshadow his abilities. “It’s like I have a shotgun in my mouth, and I’ve got my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal,” he told a judge in 1999 while on trial for breaking the terms of an earlier parole; there, Downey’s decision to reunite and hire the legal team that got O.J. Simpson acquitted of murder charges felt uncomfortably like just another stunt.
In the mid-2000s, after going through prison, rehab, and several media cycles’ worth of condemnation and confession—as well as a comeback spot on Ally McBeal—Downey got white hot with a superlative run of inspired films. First up was a self-reflexive triumph as a mouthy, anxious actor in Shane Black’s post-Tarantino noir Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which accommodated Downey’s gift for synapse-fast quips (“I invented dice,” he tells a semi-impressed girl at a Hollywood party) while giving him room to develop an affectingly sleazy sense of chivalry. Then, despite famously feuding with David Fincher, Downey all but stole Zodiac as the flamboyant real-life investigative reporter Paul Avery, a character whose alcohol-induced downward spiral drew on aspects of Downey’s own life; holed up on a houseboat with only an Atari and some Aqua Velvas for company, he’s a spectacular wreck.
Downey’s sole Oscar nomination during this period came for his outrageous appearance in Ben Stiller’s industry satire Tropic Thunder as a self-absorbed, award-winning character actor who gets “pigmentation alteration” to play a Black soldier in a Vietnam War drama. Throwing caution to the wind, Downey turned himself into a walking sight gag, albeit one layered with trenchant commentary about the hypocrisy of artists who confuse provocation with acclaim and get lost inside their own methodology. “I know who I am,” he insists angrily in the throes of multiple-identity crisis. “I’m the dude playing the dude disguised as another dude.” It’s a hilarious performance, and possibly the gutsiest thing Downey ever did on-screen, although he arguably deserved a Purple Heart for his amorous improvisations opposite a hopping-mad Mike Tyson in James Toback’s docu-fictional comedy Black and White. “I had a dream about you,” says Downey to the ex-champ, clearly ad-libbing; when Tyson smacks him, it’s one of those moments that discombobulates your responses, not only between whether it’s real or staged, but between whether the actor is brilliant, deluded, or a bit of both.
Typically, a great Downey performance is an exercise in hairpin turns—a gauntlet of fast-twitch facial and verbal tics that makes it impossible to predict the direction of the next line read. In 1987, reviewing his breakthrough performance in The Pick-Up Artist opposite Molly Ringwald, Pauline Kael likened the actor to a prodigious puppy, writing perceptively that ”his soul is floppy-eared.” By contrast, Downey’s performance in Oppenheimer is a slow burn, and the actor—who hadn’t been in a feature in three years—seems to be repressing his usual dynamism. “Power,” says Strauss, “stays in the shadows,” and as shot by Hoyte van Hoytema in high-contrast black and white, Downey looks more sepulchral than ever. He’s like his own haunted portrait, rotting away on the inside. In lieu of the actor’s usual nervous, flitting mannerisms, he gives Strauss the stillness of a man who’s used to being the center of gravity in any given situation. His eyes, though, are alert—he’s the sort of guy who can hold your gaze while looking over his own shoulder.
There’s a certain gimmicky genius in casting the man who played Tony Stark as an atomic power broker, but the role isn’t a joke or a stunt. Instead, it’s a smoldering, slow-burn study of Machiavellian ethics being put into motion, a portrait of admiration mutating into contempt. As the film opens, Strauss—who served as the secretary of commerce under Dwight Eisenhower and was one of the architects of the Atomic Energy Commission—is depicted as one of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s biggest fans, offering him a cushy posting at a Princeton think tank. Strauss’s glad-handing is strategic, though, and when he realizes it isn’t working, he reverses tack, using his position and influence to try to destroy Oppenheimer’s credibility and career as the Cold War goes into a deep freeze.
The Strauss-Oppenheimer rivalry figures into Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography, American Prometheus, and Nolan, who is a dramatist and not a documentarian, exploits it for maximum resonance. This includes inventing a whispered conversation between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein that transforms Strauss from a gregarious (and not so subtly star-fucking) host into a third wheel who’s so vain he thinks they’re talking about him. It’s a dramatic conceit that works because Downey understands the depths of his character’s pettiness—the way that intellectual insecurity can eat at even a brilliant man’s sense of self until he sees enemies everywhere. Nolan loves duality in his scripts, and he and Downey make Strauss into Oppenheimer’s elegant but ugly fun house mirror image: a facile social climber who’s just conversant enough with real genius to know he doesn’t have it, and who’s willing to go scorched-earth in order to establish dominance.
“I was thinking, how can I make Strauss’s competitiveness with Oppenheimer personal?” Downey told The New York Times last summer. “And it was: Look at that building over there that’s no better than mine getting all the shine! I don’t think there’s another human being alive that can’t admit to having fallen into the vagaries of comparison.” Take the crucial moment when, having rolled out the red carpet at Princeton, Strauss makes an attempt to talk shop with one of the great minds of his generation. “I’m not trained in physics or anything else,” he tells Oppenheimer, as if trying to be magnanimous. “I’m a self-made man.” Here, Downey inhabits Strauss’s wounded pride with a palpable—if suppressed—depth of feeling, and it’s hard not to cringe when his guest teases him further about his working-class background, asking, not so rhetorically, whether he was “once a lowly shoe salesman.” “No,” says Strauss, as if willing his thin smile not to fall. “Just a shoe salesman.”
The performance is impeccable, but the competition is stiff. This year’s Best Supporting Actor category is exceptionally strong, starting with Robert De Niro’s formidable disappearing act as a genocidal mastermind in Killers of the Flower Moon. Meanwhile, in another award season, the strategically over-the-top turns by Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things and Sterling K. Brown in American Fiction would have been the last word in cartoon stylization, but they’re up against Ryan Gosling’s Ken, who’s likely to endure as Barbie’s most inspired creation (and definitive proof that Gosling is better when he’s poking fun at po-faced alpha male brooding than trying to approximate it). It’d be a stretch, however, to suggest that Gosling, at 43, is “due,” whereas Downey is both richly deserving and in range of that “career achievement” statuette—an acknowledgment not only of his gifts but of his decision to apply them toward a different kind of blockbuster.
In what might be Downey’s best scene, Strauss asks his team whether the confirmation hearings he’d been treating as a formality have been swayed against him. He looks off-screen, away from his aides and toward a future when he’ll be remembered as a footnote in Oppenheimer’s narrative. “I’m denied,” he says curtly, with a stoicism that barely masks heartbreak. He’s right, and in the same moment, Downey is undeniable.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.