Robert Downey Jr. on Dr. Doom, ‘The Sympathizer’ and Broadway Debut

“It was a bear,” the actor Robert Downey Jr. acknowledges on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast as we began discussing The Sympathizer. He appeared in Park Chan-wook’s HBO limited series earlier this year just one month after winning an Oscar for his performance in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. In the adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Vietnam, Downey plays five different characters who cross paths with “The Captain,” a North Vietnamese mole in the South Vietnamese army. He portrays Claude, a CIA operative; Professor Hammer, an Asian-American Studies professor; Rep. Ned Godwin, a war-hawk congressman; Niko Damianos, an arrogant filmmaker; and a French priest.

“It was exhausting,” Downey continues. “I really had to prepare. In a lot of ways, it was the ultimate in extremes: You can’t fake it if you haven’t prepared for each one individually, and you also want to kind of make it seem like you’re rolling off a log. Depending on the day, I would stick exactly to the script verbatim, or I would see occasionally — or more than occasionally — an opportunity to vamp a little bit.”

Any one of the five performances would have been worthy of recognition, but the fact that all of them were given by the same actor — with four of the characters even appearing together in a single scene, in the show’s third episode — made it impossible for the Television Academy not to recognize Downey with the second Emmy nomination of his career. It comes 23 years and, in some ways, a whole lifetime, after his first for Ally McBeal, and it has left him the frontrunner in the category of best supporting actor in a limited or anthology series or TV movie.

An Oscar win and an Emmy win in the same year? Few have ever even been nominated for both in the same year. But Downey, of course, is not just anyone. He is that rarest of combinations: one of our greatest actors and one of our biggest stars.

Now just a few months shy of his 60th birthday, he is currently in New York preparing to make his Broadway debut at Lincoln Center in McNeal, a play about an A.I.-obsessed novelist, which will begin previews on Sept. 5 and open on Sept. 30. He took some time away from that to reflect on his life and career — and to expand, for the first time since his surprise appearance at last month’s San Diego Comic-Con, about the exciting news that he will returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not as Iron Man, but as the villainous Dr. Victor von Doom, in 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday and 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars.

* * *

Robert Downey Jr. has been in show business for 54 years, initially appearing as a child in films directed by his father, the pioneering indie filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., and starring his mother, Elsie Ann Downey (who often played multiple characters herself). Over the decades since, his life has been like a rollercoaster, ascending to the highest of highs and plummeting to the lowest of lows. He was cast on Saturday Night Live and starred in a studio movie, 1985’s Weird Science, at 20; he was nominated for the best actor Oscar for his stunning performance in 1992’s Chaplin at 27; and he was routinely described as one of the best actors of his generation by 30. But, more or less simultaneously, he was also battling addiction, which resulted in arrests and multiple stints in rehab and jail, and which looked, for a time, like it could jeopardize not only his career but his very survival. Many — maybe even most — counted him out.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously once declared, “There are no second acts in American life” — but he never met Downey, who, with the love and support of his second wife and Team Downey producing partner Susan Downey, rather miraculously rebuilt himself. Indeed, he cleaned up, returned to work and reminded people of his chops in a handful of indies. He was then cast as superhero Iron Man in the 2008 film of the same name that launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with which he remained an integral part from 2008 through 2019. He went on to get two more Oscar nominations, both in the category of best supporting actor: the first for 2008’s Tropic Thunder and the second for Oppenheimer.

Today, one finds Downey physically and mentally healthy, happily married, respected and celebrated by his peers, and as busy as ever — with not only McNeal rehearsals and his upcoming reunion with Marvel but also a big-screen remake of Vertigo; Happy Coffee, a coffee brand that he started to raise money for the National Alliance on Mental Illness; and much more. It’s all enough to keep, well, five people busy!