Robert Downey Jr.

Robert Downey Jr. portrayed Tony Stark/Iron Man in Iron Man, Iron Man 2, The Incredible Hulk, The Consultant, The Avengers, Iron Man 3 and Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Significant roles

 * Ian in Weird Science (1985)
 * Derek Lutz in Back to School (1986)
 * Albert Einstein in That's Adequate (1989)
 * Charles Chaplin in Chaplin (1992)
 * Thomas Reilly in Heart and Souls (1993)
 * Wayne Gale in Natural Born Killers (1994)
 * John Royce in U.S. Marshals (1998)
 * Pete Graham in Gothika (2003)
 * James Barris in A Scanner Darkly (2006)
 * Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder (2008)
 * Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes (2009)
 * Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)

Quotes

 * "It's hard not to have a personality meltdown [...] after about several hours in that suit. I'm calling up every therapeutic moment I can think of to just get through the day."
 * "If you ask me, the next one is about what do you do with the rest of your life now that you're completely changed? And you are in touch, and you have created this thing that has the power to take life. Essentially, you have been made into a god. A human being, metaphorically, who's been made into a god is not going to turn out so well. And their conscience is going to come to bear".
 * "You know, I think that we have an opportunity with the third Iron Man to make the best of the three, and maybe one of the better superhero movies that’s ever been made. But I think we have to remember what made the first one good. It was very character-driven. It was very odd. It was kind of outrageous. And so I think we have to have the courage to trust that the audience is actually really kind of cool and smart."
 * "Tony Stark is open to all possibilities and has no problem accepting extraordinary happennings. Joining The Avengers team is an act of curiosity - he wants to see what's happening first-hand. He realized a while ago that he's not an island and this time around he is beginning to understand that it's about a group mindsent and that 'we' is better than 'I.' "
 * "Aside from casting, what Marvel does best is pick the right directors and it’s always an exciting announcement. Writing the script for The Avengers is much more precise because it’s a more complex piece of machinery, where you’re trying to interface eight characters and have them all make sense, all have arcs and get their day in the sun."
 * "When we were in the first of several iterations of the storyline, the only thing I was sure about was that Tony Stark needed backup. I said to Joss and Kevin, ‘We really need Pepper to be involved in some way.’ I felt like it’s been a while since we have seen Tony and Pepper and they have grown to be pretty close and it just makes sense that she would have some kind of influence over his decision to join The Avengers team."
 * "I radically want to challenge Stark's identity, rather than just have him battle another bad guy. These things tend to, in Act 3, really become about the same old things. So let's really flip that. I feel like I don't know where you go after Iron Man 3. Leave it all on the field, you know?"
 * "We're actually shooting another end scene for Avengers. I think every movie I do is going to be one of the three biggest films of all time, so it's finally happened."
 * "Don's and mine's deal runs out after Iron Man 3, then we're going to figure out what we want to continue. The future is uncertain, I'm super happy. This has just been an amazing journey."
 * "The idea this time is, what is the need for this third picture? How does it tie it together? There's been a wishlist of scenes we've wanted to see."
 * "We always liked it.. you like the idea of him struggling with this [alcoholism], but there isn't enough plot. I think he's got the plug in the jug this time."
 * "You can dissect why The Avengers was the right movie with the right people and the right director at the time. But we feel the same way about Iron Man 3 now."
 * "I adore him. I’ve been a fan of Shane Black since I saw Lethal Weapon. When we were doing the first Iron Man, Jon Favreau and I used to call up Shane Black. We had two lifeline calls; one was to J.J. Abrams, which was about the third act of Iron Man. And for the other call, we went to Shane’s house. We couldn’t afford him, so in exchange for helping us with a few key scenes, he asked for a piece of Salmon and fresh blueberries. For instance, in the Iron Man scene where Tony Stark comes back from captivity and calls a press conference, and then asked everybody to sit down, the speech Stark gives all came from Shane Black. So to get him to do Iron Man 3, it has just been this awesome experience and one of my favorite working experiences. Iron Man 3 is going to be a very, very bold genre film, from the storytelling."
 * "Jon Favreau reprises his role as Happy Hogan. Happy has an amazing arc in this movie. In fact, probably the best two bits of acting in the movie, so far from what I can tell...which sucks because I’m in every frame, are Favreau as Happy Hogan...I can’t give away much, but it’s ridiculous. And also Sir Ben Kingsley. Kingsley is amazing. And a lot of that had to do with the way that Shane crafted the role for Sir Ben. I think that people are gonna be not totally surprised, but they’re gonna be just reinvested in what a brilliant actor Kinglsey is."
 * "Shane Black really knows the superhero genre, but I think the main thing, that’s great about him, is that he’s always looking at complexities within complexities, and so on. And he always likes it when a film kinda stops for a reason you can’t understand and then kinda picks up and goes in a direction you’ve never imagined. Usually when you have a straight-forward narrative, if at act 1, 2 or 3, ‘There’s Tony, Tony’s in trouble, where’s Pepper, Tony wins,’...By the time we were doing the 2nd one, I was like ‘where’s Pepper.’ Shane is just a genius!"
 * "I’ve always said that while I’m physically able, I want to do all my own stunts in the movies that I make. I want the audience to sit there, thinking, ‘was he really stupid enough to attempt that?’ I actually hurt my ankle in a stunt and filming was shut down for a few days."
 * "I think Shane’s gone for a dark feel in this movie. It’s a lot grittier and goes back to its comic-book roots. It’s shaped into a really special movie - and Shane as been instrument in that."
 * "I always think there's something more terrifying about a villain who's a genius, as opposed to just relying on strength or ability. We all know what a fantastic actor Ben Kingsley is, and he pulls off the evil genius with real terrifying results."
 * "You know, you guys are probably looking for a really cool answer, but I live in Malibu and traffic getting into LA can be crazy. I'd use it just to fly straight into the city for a meeting or dinner."
 * "We’ve just been talking about one sequence – the top-secret name is the Boot/Glove Sequence, I can tell you that, just between you and me – it’s where Tony only has one gauntlet and one boot and he has to escape multiple captors. It’s really fun, dude. We’re taking everything from his first gauntlet test in the first movie up through the most extreme stuff we thought up for Iron Man 2 and The Avengers and pulling on all of it and making this one big, extended challenge of physics."
 * "Since I was just talking about Flight and Don is on my mind, I’ll start with him. Rhodey is much more in the dead center of things. He’s much more dynamic. We’ve made this decision that while Tony is a technical guy, he’s not really a trained guy. There’s a lot of fun to be had with Don because he’s really good with hardware and he’s a martial artist, so it’s been really fun exploiting this possibility of Tony having moments like the one in Avengers, like the one with Cap where he decides, “Oh screw it, he probably knows what he’s doing.” So there’s a lot of that and a lot more fun and a lot more depth to Rhodey this time around."
 * "The whole Avengers thing was such a relief & such a confirmation of Kevin Feige’s vision for this all along. As Kevin has put it, the next step after that is to bring in someone like Shane Black & – without pretending that Avengers don’t exist – find a way to go back to a kind of re-investigation of Tony’s world, which he thought would be, one, fun for the audience &, two, would rock in a different way than The Avengers. But we can’t help it; everywhere you look now in every Marvel movie there are opportunities where certain new pals of his could be useful. So they’re in the atmosphere, so to speak, but I wouldn’t expect to see them on the ground in this one."
 * "The nice thing about Marvel’s kind of unprecedented success is they are already able to do what Warners had done along, which is avoid that approach of beginning [a project by picking a release] date and working backwards from there. And by avoiding that you get a schedule where there’s more space. And, also, the smart money always says, Let’s wait a little longer and do a little better. When I first thought of what my world would be like if every other year I had to put out a product for more than one franchise, the thought was: Well how will I ever get to do anything else? But neither seems to be hurrying toward their deaths and still there’s space that allows the rest."
 * "Sir Ben is probably going to steal the movie. There are a lot of contenders who may, but right now he’s probably at the top of that list. He came in as, obviously – speaking of training – as such a technically proficient instrument. And then what proceeded to happen was the release of more vintage, old-school Favreau [improv] stuff with a Shane Black twist on it. It was kind of frightening to witness, I’ll tell you that much."
 * "We hadn’t worked together so we shared only Lord Attenborough, and yeah, of course, there was a connection. We took some pictures together to send Dickie, which must be the strangest visual for him to see — the two of us playing the bad guy and the good guy. We shot them out in front of a mansion in Miami, it was a magical place, actually. Vizcaya was an interesting place, very cool. And it was an interesting time. As you know, I busted my ankle in August and we shut down for a little while, and it ended up being great for us. It was the first time in my personal history we got the creative luxury of being able to stop about two-thirds of the way through and really recalibrate everything and prepare for all of the hurdles ahead. And the mainstay of the Ben/Mandarin was kind of up next and straight away throughout, and then lots of Rhodey stuff and lots of fight stuff."
 * "Truth be told, we did shoot in China for about a week in December after finishing principal photography. There will be some action there in the film. My main interplay through the whole thing was that China figures in as a destination spot for Tony for a reason but I can’t explain [more because it would reveal] one of the ongoing themes of the movie. It’s tied-in to that theme in much the same way the 10 rings are tied-in to Mandarin — and always have been tied-in to the Mandarin. Let’s just say Tony has a lot of karma in the east and therefore I’ve been meeting our new Chinese partners and one of their actors — kind of the Gene Hackman of China — can and worked with us, which was a thrill and a pleasure, and I will be figuring in a visit to the Beijing Film Festival in our promotional tour. You know, often as business partnerships start up and form it takes time. It hasn’t really hit a critical mass, but it’s there, it’s real and it’s happening. But I suspect the real fruits of it are down the road a little bit."
 * "The first six months of pre-pre-production when you get hired to a Marvel movie is like taking a four-year college course in humility. The strongest ones survive and they move into prep and then they shoot the movie and they still look like a human being. The great thing about Shane is the same thing that’s great about Shane’s movie is that all the moving parts within the frame of his story are so poetic and inherently entertaining and then thought out and rethought out. And then everyone all the way through really put their nose to the grindstone this time and I really felt like we were in a much safer playground than we were with Iron Man 2 just because it was Shane’s vision. And he had a lot, lot, lot of time to figure out just one thing, which was to figure what the story would be. Jon and I were still kind of recovering from our lives changing so much with the success of the first Iron Man and then next thing we were back in the saddle again. We made do."
 * "There's a little bit of soul reclamation going on. I feel that the first time I played Tony, I did it best. Sorry! The affinity with Tony now is: how do you sustain something? I'm not stupid, I like to play ball, I love the company, I love the character, and the business side of things, I'm not to picky about that either."
 * "Tony's going to carry on. Avengers 2 already has a release date!"
 * "[about creating a never-ending series like 007's] It would probably be the best thing in the world for me. You know, ego...but sometimes ego just has to be smashed. Let's see what happens. I take the audience very seriously - I feel bad when I see folks doing movies and the audience is like, 'Don't do that anymore.' I don't have to overstay my welcome..."
 * "I think Iron Man wound up being the first time I screen-tested since Chaplin. As far as I was concerned, it was destiny. Now, I can't tell you how many people are sitting around with the cold, hard evidence that it wasn't. I just wasn't going to let lack of perseverance, lack of preparation, or lack of prayer get in the way. I just went crazy — in a good way. And suddenly it occurred to me, Oh my God, Stan Lee might not know this, but everything he created has all been leading to this moment. It's me. Then I thought, Hold on a second, dude, is this just some sort of neurotic personality meltdown happening here? And then I thought, Nah, that feels different."
 * "When you do the HUD work, usually it's kind of the last thing in the schedule. And you're going back and essentially leaving the movie again in close-up, tired."
 * "I don't like, [as himself] 'All right. What's happening now?' [as the director] 'Oh, the most important woman in your life is falling off crane into a fiery pit. Okay? So, let's just rehearse once and then we'll do it about 10 or 12 times until the camera is right and you've given enough.' They're just screaming direction at you... I like the scenes. I like the action."
 * "The costume is lighter; it's more flexible... There is no comfortable version of it, so it's kind of like, 'Hey, don't you think these bamboo chutes are actually a little less rough on the cuticle until they get down to the nerve?"
 * "Some of you might know him from all the great movies he's written like Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang a film we did together. He was a great choice for reinvigorating the franchise. He's a very particular point of viewed, he's very offbeat, he's very smart and clever. It's hard to keep these movies fresh. I think we're going to be really pleased with what Shane did with the movie."
 * "What Jon Favreau said when the first Iron Man was successful - he said it's because Tony has a relationship and it's a relationship that even though it's a genre movie, you can kind of relate to it, it had some depth. Over the course of the movies, obviously, they haven't broken up, they're getting closer and closer so as the relationship gets deeper so do the issues and the challenges."
 * "Well, I would say Pepper is his greatest strength because he's able to understand that she knows him better than he knows himself and of course weakness, for any character in a film or person is always their own ego. It always has you make decisions that are advisable, not to make. And as usual, Tony decides to take things into his own hands a little bit but he's more mature in this film. He still doesn't know what to get his girlfriend for Christmas but he wants to know."
 * "I think there's nothing stupider than when kind-of talented people show up and talk about a genre movie like it's some sort of important work. We know that these are popular entertainment but we think about them in considerate ways, I remember talking about Pepper when we were doing The Avengers, I said, "I need Pepper in there" and then I tried to explain the plot of The Avengers to Gwyneth and she was like, "Just stop, I'll never understand this." Because it went so far away, as it was supposed to, from Jon Favreau's original vision that the Iron Man movies are based in a reality that seems tangible. You know, you could build this suit, these kinds of things could happen and we didn't want to jump the shark with Avengers but I remember I also thought in some development meeting, "If the sky opened up and there was a wormhole and I saw aliens, wouldn't I be just a little bit nervous, after that." And that sort of led to some of the challenges."
 * "It's crazy, were pretty intertwined, we hang out. Some people, they're only close when they're in front of cameras or they're talking about how close they are even though they never hang out together. We make a point of spending time together."
 * "It got me thinking about how big the message from your cosmic sponsor needs to be before you pick it up. How many genre movies can I do? How many follow-ups to a successful follow-up are actually fun? I come from a family of very innovative writers and directors and actors and artists, and the circle of friends they were in were the people I heard having pun-offs playing poker at two in the morning, and it was just the most comforting aspect of my childhood. So there's this kind of legacy of souls from what I consider to be a very particular time in entertainment, and I'm sensing a return to that. I don't know. I don't know. Right now I don't have a contract to do anything, and I did for the last five years."
 * "It’s down to Kevin Feige and Ike Perlmutter and Disney to come to us with what the proposal is, and that’s on us to agree or disagree. When things are going great, there’s a lot of agreement. It’s that thing of: why give up the belt when it feels like you can barely get jabbed? Most people are saying that right when they get knocked out."
 * "I’ve gone from being convinced that I am the sole integer in the approbation of a phenomenon to realizing that I was the lead in the first of a series of movies that created a chain reaction that, if everything didn’t fire the way it was supposed to, there’s no operator, no anything. And you go, O.K., life is doing something here that included me but did not require me. But, yes, that role means a lot. Marvel is kind of like this sacred brotherhood."

Trivia
Robert Downey Jr is the third actor to win the Saturn Award for Best Actor. The other two were Tobey Maguire and Hugh Jackman.