Robert Downey Jr. says ‘Oppenheimer’ role was like “picking fly shit out of pepper”
Robert Downey Jr. has said that preparing for his role in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was like “picking fly shit out of pepper”.
- READ MORE: ‘Oppenheimer’ review: Christopher Nolan’s mind-blowing biopic hits like a bomb to the brain
Back in March, Downey Jr. won his first Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role of the manipulative government official Lewis Strauss in the film.
Now, the actor has compared the technical precision that was required of him in that role to the different demands he faced while filming the new HBO black comedy drama The Sympathizer, co-created by Oldboy director Park Chan-wook.
“I knew that playing Strauss, in Oppenheimer, was going to be like picking fly shit out of pepper — that it was going to be extremely exacting, that it was going to be … not confining, but liberating by its varied implicit limitations of what my usual toolbox is,” Downey said in an interview with Esquire.
“So I had a feeling that, like a coiled spring, Sympathizer would be my unwind.”
Downey’s Oscar win for Oppenheimer came with his third nomination: he had previously received nods for 1992’s Chaplin and 2008’s Tropic Thunder. Accepting the award, he said: “I’d like to thank my terrible childhood and the Academy – in that order.”
In The Sympathizer, a miniseries that tells the story of a North Vietnam plant in the South Vietnam army during the end of the Vietnam War, Downey plays four different roles, including a US congressman and a CIA agent. The first episode premiered last night (April 14), with six further episodes to follow.
In other Downey news, Jodie Foster recently revealed that she was concerned for his health while she directed him in the 1995 film Home For The Holidays.
She recalled that she “took him to one side” before saying: “Look, I couldn’t be more grateful for what you’ve given in this film. But I’m scared of what happens to you next.”
“Right now you are incredibly good at balancing on the barstool. But it’s really precarious, and I’m not sure how that’s going to end.”
“One time, I got into a bit of a sticky situation where it kind of ended my career,” he said. “I was drunk in the back of a police car and I said some stupid shit, and all of a sudden: blacklisted. I’m the poster boy for cancelled.
“A couple of years into that [Robert] invited me to some kind of award he was getting—we always had this kind of seesaw thing, where if he was on the wagon, I was falling off, and if I was on the wagon, he was falling off.”
“So I was pretty much non-existent in Hollywood at the time, and he stood up and spoke for me. It was a bold and generous and kind gesture. I loved him for that.”
Downey Jr. also recently revealed that he would return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, should the opportunity arise.
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Max Pilley
NME
