Robert Downey Jr. has said he thinks some of his "best work" was as Tony Stark/Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe - but that may be a little underestimated because of the superhero genre.
As reported by Variety, Downey Jr. was a guest of Rob Lowe's 'Literally!' podcast and his phone rang during the show. This caused Lowe to joke, "Is that some Marvel s***? Are you going to break some stories here?"
"Not just yet," Downey Jr. answered.
“You know what I say," Lowe chimed in after. "That phone is going to ring, baby, and I want to be on that call. I want to be negotiating for you. I know what your deal is. Here’s what you do. You go, ‘I’ll come back and I’ll play Tony Stark for you guys again since you f***** everything up. But I want a gazillion dollars. I know what that number should be, and I want first dollar gross of every ensuing movie. That’s what I would do.”
Downey Jr. just laughed off the comment from Lowe, saying, "That sounds quite hostile!" He did, however, open up about his 11 years playing the character that began the MCU. Specifically, how he felt about his portrayal of the iconic hero and what it was like after he made his grand exit and thought he could do no wrong. That all changed, according to Downey Jr., with Dolittle.
"I felt so exposed after being in the cocoon of Marvel where I think I did some of the best work I will ever do, but it went a little bit unnoticed because of the genre,” Downey Jr. said. “[I] did myself a favor, because the rug was pulled so definitively out from underneath me and all the things that I was leaning on as opposed to what my understanding of confidence and security was, boy did they evaporate. And it rendered me teachable.”
Dolittle opened in January 2020 and stands to this day as one of Downey Jr.'s worst-reviewed movies of his career. He shared the sentiment and even told Lowe that it "just didn't work.
In our Dolittle review, we said, "You might like the cast, the property, and have a healthy appreciation for big swings or "so bad it's good" January dumps. But there's too little to love in Dolittle. The film is barely that, crudely stitched together with lazy fart jokes, glaring ADR, and a cut that'll make any cinephile cringe."
While many around the world would love to see Downey Jr. again in the MCU, Marvel has gone on record to say it never wants to "magically undo" Iron Man's death from Avengers: Endgame. Could that phrasing mean the multiverse may find a way for us to see him without undoing his sacrifice? Only time will tell.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
