“Iron Man’ Downey Says ‘I’m Back’

“I’m making a hell of a comeback,” says Robert Downey, Jr. who has the starring role in the Paramount’s summer tentpole, ‘Iron Man’. “What I’m loving lately is hearing that Iron Man was always a second-tier superhero…operative word, was,”

Downey met with director Jon Favreau at Marvel. “In the hallway on the way out I’m looking these posters films they have that have done fairly well,” says Downey. “I’m thinking, this could be cool. I said, Jon, I think I’m really the guy for this role. He says, I think you’d be perfect, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I said, well I think it’s going to happen. Let me know if it comes down to a screen test or something. It would be a pleasure. And, that’s how it went down.”

“The hardest part was trusting that all this gack and gear was going to balance out with how we do the acting,” says Downey. “It was $165 million, or something like that, that was going to go down the tubes if we didn’t try to make something entertaining. My feeling about when I’m working is it’s an athletic endeavor. I’m trying to make or beat a time. The hardest part of this is it was a really big science project.” That was the mental part. The other challenge was physical.

“It was a physically demanding part,” says Downey. “I figured, if I was going to look like I could be in shape, I might as well do it before I’m too old to have it be feasible. Sometimes you just train in order to be able to survive what you’re going to have to do on the job.”

“The coolest for me was John and I at the end of a 12-hour day got into some cars in Seoul, Korea, went out to the military base and did an impromptu screening for the soldiers and some of their kids,” says Downey. “That was something else! That really gave us a shot in the ass.”

“I think that mythology and science are practically the same thing these days,” says Downey. “We’re getting on the plane to come here and it says Popular Mechanics ‘The Real Iron Man’ and it’s talking about these Raytheon super-soldier things that they’re building. They say that by 2020 we’ll have these things.”

Downey compares his comeback to Fisherman’s wharf in San Francisco. “There’s this tank of crabs and you pick them out,” says Downey. “Every once and a while this crab will flit to the top like it’s going to get out. Every time one of them gets to the top, one of the other crabs will pull him back down. So, you’ve got to try to get out of the tank.”

‘Iron Man’Rating: PG-13 for some intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and brief suggestive content

Distributor: Paramount

Running Time: 2 hours, 6 minutes

Release Date: May 2, 2008 (wide)