robert downey jr the biography

Robert Downey Jr.

Actor Robert Downey Jr. is known for roles in a wide variety of movies, including Iron Man , The Avengers , and Sherlock Holmes. He won an Academy Award for the 2023 biopic Oppenheimer .

1965-present

Latest news: Robert Downey Jr. Wins Best Supporting Actor Oscar

Iron Man is officially an Oscar winner.

The 58-year-old vacillated between earnestness and self-deprecating humor throughout his acceptance speech. “I’d like to thank my terrible childhood and the Academy—in that order,” he started off. Later, he took a frank turn: “Here’s my little secret: I needed this job more than it needed me.”

Downey swept the this year’s awards season. He won at the Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice Awards, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Similarly, Oppenheimer enjoyed a successful run and entered the 2024 Oscars as the most nominated movie .

Quick Facts

Early movies and snl, movies of critical acclaim, substance abuse problems, move to television with ally mcbeal, box office hits, awards for oppenheimer, wife and children, path to sobriety, who is robert downey jr..

Actor Robert Downey Jr. is best known for his portrayal of Tony Stark, a.k.a superhero Iron Man, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film franchise and roles in movies like Chaplin , Tropic Thunder . Downey made his first movie appearances and was a cast member on Saturday Night Live in the 1980s, but his growing success was marred by years of struggles with drug abuse. Eventually turning his life around, he earned a resurgence of critical and widespread acclaim and is now considered one of Hollywood’s A-list actors. Downey most recently gave an Oscar-winning performance as Lewis Strauss in the 2023 biopic Oppenheimer .

FULL NAME: Robert John Downey Jr. BORN: April 4, 1965 BIRTHPLACE: New York City SPOUSES: Deborah Falconer (1992-2004) and Susan Levin (2005-present) CHILDREN: Indio, Exton, and Avri ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aries

Famed actor Robert Downey Jr. was born on April 4, 1965, in New York City, the son of the avant-garde filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., best known for the 1969 film Putney Swope . Downey began acting as a young child. His mother, Elsie, was an actress who instilled in her son a love of performing. Raised in Greenwich Village with his older sister, Alison, Downey made his film debut playing a puppy in his father’s film Pound (1970), in which actors played dogs. He would go on to have small parts in several more of his father’s films.

Downey’s parents divorced when he was 13, and the young actor ended up living in Los Angeles with his father. At 16, however, he dropped out of high school and was on the move again, relocating to New York to live with his mother.

Downey made his earliest feature film appearances in such films as Baby, It’s You (1983), Firstborn (1984), Weird Science (1985) and Back to School (1986). From 1985 to ’86, he was a regular cast member of Saturday Night Live , NBC’s popular sketch-comedy program.

The Pick-up Artist and Less Than Zero

Downey’s first leading role on the big screen was as a charming womanizer in The Pick-up Artist (1987), a romantic comedy co-starring Molly Ringwald written and directed by James Toback. His breakthrough performance came in 1987 with Less Than Zero (1987), where he co-starred with Andrew McCarthy. Downey played the party-loving, cocaine-addicted Julian Wells in the film.

By the early 1990s, Downey had established a reputation as a critically acclaimed A-List actor. He earned praise for his comic turn as a shifty soap opera producer in Soapdish (1991), co-starring Sally Field , Kevin Kline, and Whoopi Goldberg . More adoration followed when Downey landed a featured role in Short Cuts (1993), the critically lauded ensemble film by Robert Altman.

A particular high point in Downey’s career came in 1993 when he was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Actor) for his performance in Chaplin (1992), directed by Richard Attenborough. In the highly acclaimed film, which didn’t go over nearly as well with audiences as with critics, Downey nimbly portrayed the legendary Charlie Chaplin from ages 19 to 83. The role displayed his dramatic range and his considerable talent for physical comedy. By this time, the 27-year-old Downey had come to be seen as one of the most gifted actors of his generation, but he had also earned a reputation as a troubled and controversial figure in Hollywood.

Natural Born Killers and Richard III

In the wake of his critical success with Chaplin , Downey anchored a documentary about the 1992 presidential election, The Last Party . In 1994, he appeared in the romantic comedy Only You , and in Oliver Stone ’s acclaimed but controversial Natural Born Killers . The following year, the actor starred in the period film Restoration alongside Meg Ryan and Sam Neill; an updated film version of Richard III , co-starring Ian McKellen and Annette Bening ; and the Jodie Foster -directed Home for the Holidays , also starring Holly Hunter.

While Downey’s acting prospects appeared on track, his personal life would be in turmoil for the next few years. Downey was introduced to drugs at the age of 8 by his father and developed a full-fledged addiction as he headed into his 20s.

“Until ( Less Than Zero ), I took my drugs after work and on the weekends,” he later explained. “Maybe I’d turn up hungover on the set, but no more so than the stuntman. That changed on Less Than Zero ... The character was an exaggeration of myself. Then things changed, and, in some ways, I became an exaggeration of the character. That lasted far longer than it needed to last.”

A stint in drug rehabilitation followed shortly afterward, but Downey’s struggles with drugs and alcohol would persist for years. In June 1996, the actor was stopped by police after driving naked in his Porsche on Sunset Boulevard and found not only to be without clothes but in possession of cocaine, heroin, and a .357 Magnum. Less than a month later, and just a few hours before he was slated to be charged, Downey ran afoul of the law again after he was found passed out in a neighbor's house.

For the next several years, Downey’s life was a haze of headline-generating, dependency-induced mistakes and their consequences. There was a 12-month stay in prison and another visit to drug rehab. In November 2000, Downey was again arrested, this time in a Palm Springs hotel room, where he was discovered with cocaine and in a Wonder Woman costume. He was charged with felony drug possession.

Downey’s trial, initially set for late January, was delayed for several months while his lawyers negotiated with prosecutors. In March 2001, the two sides failed to reach a plea bargain, and the case was set for a preliminary hearing at the end of April. On April 24, 2001, Downey was arrested for allegedly being under the influence of an undisclosed “stimulant.”

Despite his turmoil in the early 2000s, Downey continued working. He gave a memorable performance in Wonder Boys (2000) and had roles in several other films, including Auto Motives and Lethargy . Additionally, Downey moved to the small screen in 2000, becoming a regular cast member of the popular show Ally McBeal , starring Calista Flockhart. Downey once again reminded fans and critics of his talent, likability, and versatility with this new role. He went on to pick up a 2001 Golden Globe Award and won a Screen Actors Guild Award soon after.

But Downey’s increasingly complicated personal life pressed his employer's patience. After that second arrest in April 2001, Downey's tenure on Ally McBeal ended; producers had decided to wrap production of the final episodes of the season without the actor. Around this same time, lawyers reached an agreement with prosecutors that required Downey to plead no contest to cocaine-related charges. He was sentenced to three years’ probation—a ruling that allowed him to continue live-in drug treatment instead of returning to prison.

Working his way back to prominence, Downey in 2003 starred opposite Halle Berry in Gothika , which fared better at the box office than it did with the critics. He continued to dedicate himself to his craft, playing a supporting role in the critically acclaimed Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) and the lead in the independent drama A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006), which he also co-produced. In Zodiac (2007), Downey plays a journalist who gets wrapped up in the hunt for the infamous Zodiac Killer.

Tropic Thunder

Taking a huge risk, Downey starred in the comedy Tropic Thunder (2008) with Ben Stiller and Jack Black ; he played a white actor pretending to be a Black actor in this war movie spoof. His efforts received primarily positive reviews, with Variety magazine’s Todd McCarthy stating that “the audacity of Downey’s performance” was one of “the best reasons to see the film.” Downey garnered numerous accolades for his performance in Tropic Thunder , including Oscar (Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role), Golden Globe (Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture), and Screen Actors Guild (Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role) nominations.

Iron Man and The Avengers Franchise

That same year, Downey established himself as a box office star by playing wealthy industrialist-turned-crime fighter Tony Stark in the smash hit Iron Man , based on the Marvel Comics superhero. The film grossed more than $318 million domestically, leading to the release of sequels in 2010 and 2013.

Stark would also become one of the central characters in the series of Marvel Cinematic Universe films that followed, headlined by The Avengers in 2012 and its three sequels later in the decade. The movies featured a bevy of Hollywood talent as iconic Marvel heroes, including Chris Evans (Captain America), Don Cheadle (Colonel James “Rhodey” Rhodes), Mark Ruffalo (Hulk), Samuel Jackson (Nick Fury) and Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow), among others.

Downey would reprise his Stark/Iron Man dual role for Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015); Captain America: Civil War (2016); Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017); Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019).

The Soloist and Sherlock Holmes

Downey went on to share top billing with Jamie Foxx in The Soloist (2009), which tells the story of the friendship between a Los Angeles journalist (Downey) and a homeless Juilliard-trained musician (Foxx). The film registered a respectable showing at the box office and earned praise from critics, who lauded Downey and Foxx for their performances.

Demonstrating he isn’t afraid of blockbusters (or English accents), Downey co-starred in the Guy Ritchie-directed Sherlock Holmes in 2009 alongside Jude Law as Dr. John Watson. The duo teamed up again for the 2011 sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows .

Downey also offered a turn as sharp city lawyer Hank Palmer, opposite Robert Duvall, in the drama The Judge (2014).

After a half-decade of appearing solely in Marvel-branded features, Downey reemerged as host of the YouTube series The Age of AI beginning in late 2019. In January 2020, he starred as a veterinarian who talks to animals in Dolittle , based on the classic children’s book series by British author Hugh Lofting.

Downey took a short hiatus from the big screen following Dolittle and focused on his work as a producer. In 2022, he appeared in and served as an executive producer for Sr. , a documentary film about the life and career of his father.

However, Downey Jr. would draw critical acclaim for his next big performance in 2023, portraying Lewis Strauss in the blockbuster biopic Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan . Although Nolan had not worked closely with the actor in the past, he contacted Downey directly regarding the role and invited him to read the screenplay for the movie—about American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb. “I felt like (Downey) just was in a place where he would be ready to come and try something completely different. And as a director, if you can convince one of the great actors of his generation to come and challenge himself in a completely different way, you just know you’re going to get something special,” Nolan told Vanity Fair .

Oppenheimer , also starring Cillian Murphy , Emily Blunt , Florence Pugh , and Matt Damon , became the third-highest-grossing movie of the year globally and was universally praised. In 2024, Downey won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor along with comparable awards at the Golden Globes, BAFTAs, Critics’ Choice Awards, and Screen Actors Guild Awards.

In contrast to his prior history with the law, Downey has a much more stable home life these days. He met producer Susan Levin on the set of Gothika in 2003, and the two were engaged in November of that year. They married in August 2005 and have two children: son Exton, born in February 2012, and daughter Avri, born in November 2014.

In June 2010, Downey and Levin began their Team Downey production company, producing films and TV shows such as The Judge (2014), Dolittle (2020), and the Netflix fantasy series Sweet Tooth . “We don’t like going too long without having an extremely difficult project together, whether it’s a movie or a kid,” Downey said jokingly in 2020.

Downey also has his eldest son, Indio (born September 1993), from his prior relationship with singer and actor Deborah Falconer, whom he married in 1992. The couple separated in 1996 and finalized their divorce in 2004.

Downey’s friend and fellow actor Anthony Michael Hall is Indio’s godfather.

Downey began to seek serious treatment for his drug addiction around 2003 and has maintained his sobriety amid his career resurgence.

One of the people to play a key role in the actor’s turnaround was Mel Gibson , with whom Downey co-starred in Air America (1990). Gibson stuck by his friend’s side, even as Downey’s life was completely unraveling. When Downey was unable to get something as routine as an insurance bond due to his past troubles with the law, Gibson found him work, casting him in the 2003 film The Singing Detective. The two actors remain close friends today.

In December 2015, California Governor Jerry Brown pardoned Downey for the 1996 drug conviction that sent him to prison for a year.

According to his IMDb profile , Downey is 5 feet, 8 inches inches tall.

According to Celebrity Net Worth , Downey’s total value is around $300 million. Much of his fortune stems from his MCU appearances as Stark. The actor made $75 million from Avengers: Endgame alone thanks to the film’s box office performance.

• I think part of my destiny has to be realizing that I’m not the poster boy for drug abuse. I’m just this guy who has a really strong sense of wanting home and wanting foundation and having not had it, I now choose to create it.
• I don’t drink these days. I am allergic to alcohol and narcotics. I break out in handcuffs.
• Until [“Less Than Zero”], I took my drugs after work and on the weekends. Maybe I'd turn up hungover on the set, but no more so than the stuntman... The character was an exaggeration of myself. Then things changed, and, in some ways, I became an exaggeration of the character. That lasted far longer than it needed to last.

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Tyler Piccotti first joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor in February 2023, and before that worked almost eight years as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. He is a graduate of Syracuse University. When he's not writing and researching his next story, you can find him at the nearest amusement park, catching the latest movie, or cheering on his favorite sports teams.

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Robert Downey Jr.

IMDbPro Starmeter Top 500 19

• Contact info
• 78 wins & 153 nominations total

The Evolution of Robert Downey Jr.

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• Sherlock Holmes

• TV Mini Series
• Mexican Stranger
• Pre-production

• Niko Damianos
• Professor Hammer ...

• Lewis Strauss

• Dr. John Dolittle

• Hank Palmer

• executive producer
• In Production

• 16 episodes

• 14 episodes

• co-producer

• In-development projects at IMDbPro

Personal details

• Celewish -Robert Downey Jr's Fans and Brand Engagement Platform
• 5′ 8″ (1.73 m)
• April 4 , 1965
• Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
• Spouses Susan Downey August 27, 2005 - present (2 children)
• Children Indio Falconer Downey
• Parents Robert Downey Sr.
• Allyson Downey (Sibling)
• Other works Recorded "Every Breath You Take" with Sting , and "Chances Are" with Vonda Shepard , both for the "Ally McBeal - Songs of the Heart" soundtrack.
• 2 Print Biographies
• 1 Portrayal
• 11 Interviews
• 29 Articles
• 9 Pictorials
• 140 Magazine Cover Photos

Did you know

• Trivia During the promotion of Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) , famously walked out of an interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy when pressed about his "dark" past because he felt it was inappropriate that children would be watching. He told Howard Stern he would leave again if that ever happened in the future.
• Quotes I've always felt like such an outsider in this industry. Because I'm so insane, I guess.
• Trademarks Sarcastic humorous deliveries while remaining completely stonefaced
• Salaries Oppenheimer ( 2023 ) $4,000,000 + backend participation
• How old is Robert Downey Jr.?
• When was Robert Downey Jr. born?
• Where was Robert Downey Jr. born?

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Robert Downey Jr: The Biography Paperback – May 1, 2011

• Print length 282 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Bonnier Publishing Fiction
• Publication date May 1, 2011
• Dimensions 5 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 184358185X
• ISBN-13 978-1843581857
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bonnier Publishing Fiction (May 1, 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 282 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 184358185X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1843581857
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.7 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• #385 in Individual Directors
• #12,432 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies

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‘Fifteen years of total insanity’: how Robert Downey Jr made peace with his maverick father

Robert Downey Sr put his son in wild underground movies and gave him access to drugs. So what happened when Downey Jr finally turned the cameras on his dad?

I n his father’s underground western Greaser’s Palace, a seven-year-old Robert Downey Jr plays, in his own words, “a boy who got his neck slit by God”. This, perhaps, explains a lot. Downey Jr grew up on Robert Downey Sr’s film sets in the 70s and 80s, amid what he calls “a cacophony of creativity”, at the heart of the counterculture cinema scene fuelled by “cigarettes and weed and booze”. He slept in a cot wedged against an editing desk, got taken to see X-rated films such as La Grande Bouffe at an absurdly young age, and went on a cross-country road trip as a kid where he “was in charge of the hash pipe”.

In the twilight of his father’s years, Downey Jr wanted some answers about why his father didn’t take better care of him. The resulting documentary – called Sr, with remorseless family logic – acts as part tribute, part therapy session and part last hurrah. “You,” Downey Jr tells his father, “did not give a mad fuck, did you?”

The elephant in the room of Sr is Downey’s turbulent period as a cocaine- and heroin-dependent young movie star (before he miraculously cleaned up his act to become at one point the world’s highest paid actor ), and the extent to which Downey Sr may or may not be responsible for his son’s addictions. In fact, it’s the elephant in the room until it isn’t. Fifty-five minutes into Sr, Downey Jr, who spends a good part of the film gently grilling his ailing father over Zoom, addresses it directly: “I think we would be remiss not to discuss its effect on me.” Downey Sr, in his 80s and beginning to succumb to Parkinson’s, readily admits that the time he spent in Los Angeles in the 1980s as a heavy-duty cocaine addict himself was “15 years of total fucking insanity”, but he isn’t too keen to get into it again. “Boy, I could sure love to miss that discussion,” he mutters.

But no matter: we cut to an interview clip that looks like it was shot in the 90s, in which Downey Sr takes it on the chin. “A lot of us thought it would be hypocritical to not have our kids participate in marijuana and stuff like that,” he says. “It was an idiot move on our parts to share that with our children. I’m just happy he’s here.” Downey Jr is in shot too, and frankly doesn’t look well. The interviewer asks: “Were you ever worried he wasn’t going to be here?” With forthright honesty Downey Sr replies: “Many times.”

Over 30 years later, the situation is very different. Downey Sr is no longer with us; he died during the making of the documentary . Downey Jr is secure in his position in the Hollywood firmament, and now seemingly anxious to draw attention to his father’s film-making achievements. Downey Sr carved his path in the underground in the 60s and 70s with chaotic absurdist abandon. He made extravagantly berserk films such as the aforementioned Greaser’s Palace, in which a pink-hatted Jesus surrogate parachutes into the old west; the plot-free comedy Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight; and probably his best known film, the Black-Power-meets-Madison-Ave satire Putney Swope , released in 1969. Another of Downey Sr’s films, Pound, in which human actors play dogs waiting to be put down, features Downey Jr’s very first screen performances, as a five-year-old.

Arguably Downey Sr’s biggest fan is film director Paul Thomas Anderson , who cast him in a small role as a recording studio guy in Boogie Nights, and of whom Downey Jr says, only a little sarcastically: “It’s no mystery that Paul Thomas Anderson is probably the son my dad wishes he had had.”

By the time Sr (the film) came to be, Downey Sr’s active film-making career was well in the past. His most recent credit was a 2005 documentary about Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square. But Sr shows, if nothing else, that the man had an unquenchable yen to direct, to the extent that he took the opportunity to commandeer Sr’s equipment and crew to shoot his own version of the same film. Sr’s actual director, Chris Smith, is known for filming tricksy subjects with their own agendas, in films such as Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened , about the disastrous festival, and Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond , in which Jim Carrey method acted as Andy Kaufman. Smith generously incorporated elements of “the Senior cut” into the finished film, and in fact says that letting Downey Sr run with it made sense for everyone. “Had he not started doing his own version, it would have been a nightmare. He would have been all over us. It kept me outside of the crosshairs, so to speak.”

Smith’s co-cinematographer and editor Kevin Ford set up an edit suite in Downey Sr’s front room – and as he became more unwell, his bedroom. His allusive, eccentric directing style is readily apparent in the way he outlines what sequences he wants filmed. In contrast to what Downey Jr calls the “legitimate” documentary he is making, Downey Sr appears to be creating an impressionistic memoir, threading together meaningful memories and chance, unrepeatable improvisations. So he takes the camera crew to the Greenwich Village address where the family lived in a converted loft (now demolished and replaced with a Nutella cafe), and has Downey Jr leap out from behind a tree and sing the same Schubert lieder he performed as a 15-year-old in a talent contest. He visits an alleyway near the Bowery where, back in the 6os, he paid a hobo $50 to lie down for a memorable dance scene in Putney Swope . A random guy doing pull-ups on scaffolding or a bunch of mopeds bombing down a boardwalk are just as much grist to the mill.

Smith, an otherwise fairly laconic individual, says it was inspiring to watch Downey Sr at work. “It was very inventive, it was very loose.” But he adds that there was “a different set of criteria” at play. “[Downey Sr] said we would be unsuccessful if half the audience doesn’t walk out of the film.” And Smith remembers the interview they shot with actor Alan Arkin . “At one point in the interview, Alan gets up and says, ‘I want to go grab a kumquat.’ He walks over and he grabs one and comes back. In the Senior cut, that was the only piece used from that whole interview.”

Smith evidently didn’t entirely share Downey Sr’s perspective: there’s no kumquat shot in the “legitimate” version, and quite a few of Arkin’s affectionately waspish comments are kept in. (“I don’t know how he came up with his casting ideas … it was like he went down the Bowery half the time and just picked up people who were half in the bag.”) Smith says discussions are ongoing as to whether the full Senior cut will actually see the light of day.

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In piecing together the varied strands, Smith faced a complex task: dipping in and out of the Senior cut as well as accommodating the father-son Zoom sessions, Downey Jr’s to-camera observations, archive clips of Downey Sr’s old films, and so on. “We wanted to embrace Senior’s looseness and his spirit. But also try to make something that functioned as a movie.” Smith says Downey Jr was initially very resistant to the film being about him … but then “things evolved and changed”. Partly due to the still-complex relationship between father and son, with much apparently needing to be said, and partly due to Downey Sr’s advancing Parkinson’s. “It sort of morphed into this film about fathers and sons and a meditation on life in general.”

For Downey Jr, there’s undoubtedly a therapeutic dimension to the documentary. In fact, we even listen in on a session he has with his therapist in which they discuss his father’s impending demise. For Downey Sr we can’t be so certain, but his wife, author Rosemary Rogers, says in the documentary that working on it “was energising and exciting” for him. “With Parkinson’s you lose a little bit of something every day, but he’s fully focused on the film. It’s everything for him.” Smith says Downey Jr was very trusting and, while Downey Jr and his wife, film executive Susan Downey, acted as producers on the project, he had little interference. “I took notes from them, for sure, but believe me, if there were issues I’d tell you.”

Downey Sr died in July 2021, shortly after finishing his cut. Downey Jr filmed a final interaction with him and his own son, Exton. Smith also got to incorporate a little of the informal tribute the Downey family held for the late patriarch. Downey Jr has his documentary/memorial, and Smith is grateful to have been in the right place at the right time. “I think everyone just felt happy and blessed and fortunate that we were able to preserve and capture a little bit of the life force that surrounded this person. I think that was such a gift. We were just lucky to be there at the right time.”

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Robert Downey Jr.’s Third Act: “He’s Lived a Complicated Life. He Understands the Stakes”

By Anthony Breznican

“Okay, last question...”

That’s usually the very first thing Robert Downey Jr. says when he sits down to start a conversation. Obviously, it’s a joke. He’s messing with you a little, but that’s what you want—the high-octane movie star firing on all cylinders, delivering that devilish charm that made Iron Man as legendary as Superman. He wants to play. But it’s also a reminder to keep up, to stay alert, and remember that this—whatever this is, our time together—is fleeting. Talk to him for any length of time and it’s clear that Downey, who grew up on camera and is now 58, is acutely aware of a ticking clock. There’s a countdown happening at all times behind those eyes. In interview after interview over the years, he has often returned to a similar fatalistic theme: Make the most of now, because the end is closer than you think. It’s definitely coming someday. Maybe soon. Who knows?

“I don’t think he operates with that hanging over him, but I do think this is a period of time where he has been very reflective, and it is something that he often references: ‘Well, I’m in the back nine,’ ” says his wife, producer Susan Downey. The couple met more than two decades ago when both were working on the 2003 horror film Gothika and married in 2005, the same year their next collaboration, the neo-noir Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, came out. Now they run the production company Team Downey, and she is intensely involved in every decision he makes, including when to take a chance and when to hold back. “He is very conscious,” she says, “of a beginning, middle, and end to telling stories”—including his own. “And he is also very conscious of not wanting to overstay a welcome, knowing when to get out before it’s too late and you regret that you didn’t.”

The hands of that ticking clock have now carried him back to a place he first found himself 30 years ago: in Oscar contention for a transformative performance. Back then it was for the lead role in 1992’s Chaplin, an alternately tender and searing portrait of the silent-film star. His next nomination came 16 years and several comebacks later, for a blistering send-up of his own profession in the 2008 Hollywood satire Tropic Thunder.

Today, Downey’s in the awards race for another metamorphosis, breathing both grandiosity and insecurity into career bureaucrat Lewis Strauss in Christopher Nolan’s nuclear-age historical drama Oppenheimer. Strauss is such a prominent antagonist that he literally changes the color of the film, with Downey anchoring black-and-white segments that capture Strauss’s postwar efforts to discredit Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic lead scientist behind the US atomic bomb program. It’s Downey’s first big screen role in three years and a model for where he is headed next—away from the sarcasm and superheroics of Tony Stark and into a more intimate, vulnerable next chapter.

For years now, Downey has been deluged with offers to play variations on Stark, and he has deflected them all. “We get tons of stuff that riff off of that. ‘Oh, he’s the smartest guy in the room,’ and ‘He’s the fast talker.’ All that kind of stuff,” Susan says. Downey himself has been ambivalent about how much he actually resembles the superhero who changed his life. “I ain’t him, I’ll tell you that flat out,” he told me when I asked him directly in 2018, on the set of Avengers: Endgame. “There’s always a bit of a burn-off period when they run out of call sheets for me in any of these movies, and I go back to being a little bit more of just…I’m just a fucking actor. I’m just a guy—who does have a very interesting past, who does not regret it, who wished to shut the door on it. I think that that translates.”

But that sense of darkness, of a past that can’t be escaped, is also part of Strauss, who is less like Stark than the kind of bureaucratic fussbudget who might turn up as an irksome apparatchik in a Marvel movie. As Susan puts it, “I think what was incredible is that Chris saw in Robert what he could be if you took all of his tools away, all the wonderful things that are very charming, very charismatic, and looked for the stillness.”

That’s how Nolan hooked him—not by making it easy, but by promising it would be hard. “Let me put it this way: I didn’t see any of Lewis Strauss in Robert Downey Jr.—at all,” says Nolan. “I didn’t know him but I’d met him a couple of times, and looking at him from the outside, I felt like he just was in a place where he would be ready to come and try something completely different. And as a director, if you can convince one of the great actors of his generation to come and challenge himself in a completely different way, you just know you’re going to get something special.”

For this story, of course, there is no “last question”—or first question, even. Downey couldn’t participate because, like all members of the Screen Actors Guild, he was on strike until our deadline had passed. But Susan, who says that in the course of their marriage she has learned to “speak Downey,” watched his immersion into the massive ensemble of Oppenheimer in real time. “He loves when something has this grand execution,” she says. “What he really likes is that tight-knit group of people who are making the decisions and creating the piece.”

That was the appeal of making Oppenheimer with Nolan and his producing partner Emma Thomas, who, like the Downeys, are another husband-and-wife filmmaking duo prone to taking big swings. “For him, Chris and Emma have just figured that out like nobody else,” Susan says.

Even their process for casting has a no-nonsense streamline to it. “When you’re doing a Chris Nolan thing, basically you get a phone call: ‘Chris wants you for this. Will you come read the script at his house?’ ” says Susan, who joked that her husband’s curiosity clashed with his, let’s say, more inert tendencies. “Robert’s like, ‘Wait, I have to drive that far east ?… Okay.’ Once he was willing to do that, I already knew his mindset was very open.”

The Oppenheimer team was surprised to meet a movie star who was willing to cast off his armor. “Honestly, he kind of subverted all my expectations of him,” Thomas says. “We’ve often talked about how amazing it’d be to work with him, but we work in a very specific, fairly stripped-down way. I wasn’t sure how he was going to adjust to that way of working because, when you’re a big movie star like Robert, that isn’t necessarily the way you’re used to working.”

But his Avengers experience had also prepared him for being part of Oppenheimer ’s gargantuan ensemble, one of 79 speaking roles in a cast that includes three best actor Oscar winners. Downey’s Strauss clashes repeatedly with Murphy’s Oppenheimer but also with his own aide (played by Alden Ehrenreich) and even with Albert Einstein (Tom Conti). Fueled by a potent mix of sincere conviction and petty grievance, he commands scene after scene of crowded public hearings, strategy sessions, and backroom machinations, but without the bemused pizzazz of his Marvel alter ego. Strauss may be a politically savvy survivor, but he’s also a black hole of personality who doesn’t so much fill a room as draw everyone into his own.

As he had on his Marvel films, Downey relished the opportunity to stray from best-laid plans, carefully mapping out a scene with filmmakers and crew only to go rogue. “From a creative point of view, he came extraordinarily well prepared,” Nolan says. “It’s a very complicated part, and he had it absolutely down. And he also had a number of, I wouldn’t call them improvisations because a lot of it was very carefully planned, but he had a number of embellishments, things that he wanted to bring to the character, things that he wanted to try out.”

Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema would follow Downey in a room as he delivered monologues that stretched multiple pages.

“I think he loved that freedom to move around the room and present himself with whatever energy he felt like: ‘Let’s try it again! Let’s try it a different way!’ ” Nolan says. “However heavy the 70-millimeter camera was, Hoyte would never get too tired. In a way, Robert was probably waiting for him to get tired, but he didn’t. So he was able to really thrash it out, really reach for something and stretch himself.”

Joe and Anthony Russo, who directed Downey in three Marvel movies, describe the Downey method in similar terms: “When he’ll come back to set, Robert is famous for throwing the plan out the window and climbing on top of the couch and whatever, sort of going off-book,” Joe says. “He does this because he likes to surprise himself. He likes to keep things fresh. He lights up for that.”

“There’s no other way that he could have played that character for 10 movies unless he was doing that,” Anthony adds. “Robert has certainly lived a complicated life. He understands the stakes, he understands loss, he understands the turns life can take between ups and downs. He’s always looking for that level of depth, that level of complexity. I think he knows that’s what we all come to movies for in the first place.”

Downey has been around so long, it’s almost hard to comprehend how far back he started—first as a child actor in his father Robert Downey Sr.’s offbeat indie films, then as smarmy sidekicks in ’80s flicks Tuff Turf, Weird Science, and Back to School. When filmmakers amplified his natural magnetism, he became a Brat Pack heartthrob, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic. In the agonizing 1987 addiction saga Less Than Zero, he plays a young man who is both endearing and self-destructive—much as Downey himself was at the time. Director Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin was regarded as a revelation, with the then 27-year-old vanishing into a soulful performance that spanned decades in Charlie Chaplin’s life. It was a turning point for Downey, but then came the turn downward.

Susan met him when he was pre-Marvel but post-meltdown. In the late 1990s, a lifetime of drug-fueled rambunctiousness overpowered him and landed the actor repeatedly in rehab and behind bars. Fortunately for Downey, rooting for the underdog was still fashionable in those pre–social media times. He won “comeback” roles, including a love interest in season four of Ally McBeal in 2000, only to be written off after his next drug-induced arrest. For a while, it seemed his demons might cost him his life, but then he got help and got clean. You couldn’t call it a second chance—he’d already blown through more than two of those. It was more like a second act, and Downey didn’t waste it. As he spent years rebuilding his life, he became a source of inspiration to others struggling with addiction. And he staged an epic professional resurgence as Iron Man, despite some industry resistance to the risk of welcoming him back at all.

In the Netflix documentary Sr., which chronicled the final years in the life of his acerbic indie filmmaker father, Robert Downey, the actor acknowledged that moviemaking is one way his family taught him to process life. “Whatever’s unfolding, funny or tragic, it’s happening with a 16-millimeter camera going, and we can reflect on it,” he tells his therapist in the film. “But then there’s some part of me that feels like, I’ll….” And there his voice breaks: “I’ll miss something.”

And that’s the challenge Downey is facing in his third reel: Don’t miss out. Don’t be idle. Don’t sit on the status he has achieved, the resources he has amassed, or the goodwill he has generated with both colleagues and the public. Lately, he has met the challenge to live twice as hard by splitting himself in two. In a pair of recent documentary projects, Sr. and the Max streaming series Downey’s Dream Cars, he is opening up about his true self and private life in a way that’s not just intimate but shockingly raw at times. Meanwhile, his acting has steered him in new directions entirely. Oppenheimer is just the first step. The next is playing four different oddball figures in the upcoming Park Chan-wook–directed espionage series The Sympathizer.

He and Susan executive-produced that show for HBO, based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2015 novel about a North Vietnamese spy undercover in the United States in the 1970s. As with Oppenheimer, Downey disappears into his role—or, in this case, roles. “Each of his characters is a white male who has found great success in American society in a variety of fields,” Park says. “You can say having a colonialist side is something they share. They are not typical saints or villains but complicated people with both virtues and flaws.”

Downey asked Park how unrecognizable he should be in each part. “I answered that I wanted the audience to be well aware a single actor is playing multiple roles—but to forget this as they become immersed in the story,” the director says. “To accomplish this, each character must have strong idiosyncrasies but remain within the realm of realism. For the audience to understand the concept that these characters are the various faces of the American ruling class, they must sense the fact it’s one actor playing them all.”

It seems staggering to consider now, but Downey was nearly passed over for the role of Iron Man. Executives at Marvel Entertainment didn’t want soon-to-be Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and Iron Man director Jon Favreau to cast him. “It purely came down to the Marvel board being nervous at putting all of their chips in their future films on somebody who famously had those legal troubles in the past,” Feige says. “I wasn’t very good—and I’m still not great—at taking no for an answer. But I also don’t pound my chest to try to get my way. I try to figure out ways to make it as clear to other people why we should head in a direction. And that’s when the idea of a screen test came up.”

Fourteen years removed from that Oscar-nominated Chaplin performance, Downey was required to put ego aside and show up on September 25, 2006, to film his audition. The execs finally conceded that Feige and Favreau were right, an assessment that has since been proven correct several billion times over. Feige remembers Downey as an essential team player who nourished a collegial atmosphere between himself and the rest of the superhero squad, becoming—in every sense of the phrase—a supporting actor. In 2013, as the first Avengers sequel went into production, he even made headlines in the Hollywood trades for using his own contract negotiations with Marvel to leverage for higher pay for his costars.

“We used to joke and say that Robert was the head of the acting department because everybody there looked up to him,” Feige says. “He took them all under his wing, but not in a subservient sense. He just became their cheerleader.” One day on the set of the first Avengers, I overheard Downey advising Chris Hemsworth about ways to manage his tax liability while filming overseas, offering to set him up with “The Missus,” Susan, to go over specifics. He was forever doing things like that—and still does.

“I even saw it at Chris Evans’s wedding,” says Susan, who joined her husband at the Captain America actor’s nuptials to Alba Baptista in September. “Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth were talking to Robert,” she says. “I was like, Oh right, he is the guy who is…I don’t want to say a mentor, but I just see him as the dude who knows a lot. He’s been through a lot of scenarios, both in life and in work, and has survived a lot.” She says she was drawn to him for the same reason. “All of the stuff that made him wonderful and weird when I met him, and made him someone unlike anyone I’ve ever known, is still who he is today.”

After 10 films, Downey’s Iron Man made his exit in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, still a high-water mark for the series. Marvel has a reputation for resurrecting characters who seemingly meet their ends, but Feige says that won’t happen to Stark. “We are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again,” Feige says. “We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way.”

Downey was reluctant even to do reshoots and redo a single line of dialogue, Stark’s last, for Endgame. “We’d already said tearful goodbyes on the last day of shooting. Everybody had moved on emotionally,” Joe Russo says. “We promised him it would be the last time we made him do it—ever.”

“That was a difficult thing for him to do, to come back to pick up that line,” Anthony Russo adds. “When he did come back, we were shooting on a stage directly opposite where he auditioned for Tony Stark. So his last line as Tony Stark was shot literally a couple hundred feet from his original audition that got him the role.”

As he was wrapping up the character, Downey was also looking back, recalling the early days of making the first movie at Edwards Air Force Base in the desert of California. Iron Man director Favreau had fought for him. Downey has always felt the responsibility ever since to pay that forward. “In my quiet moments of reverie, I remember being in the high desert…I think for my birthday and also maybe it was Passover? April 2007,” Downey told me in 2018. “I remember it all feeling very much like a significant time in the art and life of Jon. I go back to the belief that he had in me—and the belief that he gave me in myself.”

In the movies, second acts seldom end on an uplifting note. That’s usually when things are darkest and most desperate for the protagonist. Four years after concluding Stark’s similarly redemptive story arc in Avengers: Endgame, Downey is…doing pretty well, actually. The fortune he earned as the flagship hero of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is enough to cushion him for several lifetimes, though he’s too restless for that. “He’s a lot more fun to live with when he has a call sheet,” his wife says.

What he wants now is what both The Avengers and Oppenheimer gave him—the chance to spar, to play, and measure up to fellow actors who test his talents. His wife describes watching TV shows and movies with him: “He watches it like a sporting event,” she says. “He’s so excited for what someone just pulled off or the degree of difficulty that he recognizes. Like, ‘Oh, my God, they shot that at night. That was probably really cold. He had to go do this physicality, give this speech, turn around, do this emotional beat….’ He’ll break it down in a way that you just see: This is somebody who respects that it’s hard.”

Downey is a genuine fan. During the making of The Judge, in 2013, he would crouch behind the monitors and wax rhapsodic about the acting chops of Vincent D’Onofrio, Jeremy Strong, and Robert Duvall during a sequence he wasn’t even in. “When he sees things he admires, he really likes to look at that, examine it, and let people know,” Susan says. She means that last part literally. “He gets excited and wants to reach out. For example, two episodes into Mr. Robot he was needing to speak to Rami Malek,” who turned out to be his eventual Oppenheimer costar. “He knew of Chris Abbott, but after seeing On the Count of Three, he had to reach out to him and to Jerrod Carmichael,” Susan says. And as for Ehrenreich, who shares all of his Oppenheimer scenes with Downey, he “can be guaranteed a FaceTime a week whether he likes it or not.”

For three years after his Marvel run ended, Downey said yes to almost nothing. (“When I’m done with this, if you hear I’m not taking a break, call me and tell me I’m crazy,” he told me as Endgame was finishing.) Then, with Oppenheimer, came something he couldn’t resist—the chance to disappear.

“I knew that he was capable of complete naturalism, of completely stripping away some of that charm, some of that persona, and losing himself in a real character,” Nolan says. “I could tell he was up for that. He was up for being challenged.” Susan remembers the first thing to go was her husband’s vanity. “Chris doesn’t really do prosthetics, and he didn’t want to do wigs and those kinds of things. They were doing some of the tests for it, I believe, and I just remember Robert came home and he was like, ‘Yep, we decided we just need to shave it.’ He created this balding head,” she says. Then she began to worry he was going too far. “He was losing weight for the role. I was looking at pictures, saying ‘I don’t think that Lewis Strauss is a really skinny, skinny guy.’ Then I saw the movie for the first time—and I’d lived with him through it, I’d seen some stills, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I get it now.’ ”

Nolan’s favorite moment of Downey’s performance came at the end of one of those long days, when a defiant Strauss finally reckons with his impending downfall. “There’s just a little moment where he just brings his hand up to his neck and it’s a handheld close-up. In that gesture, you just see into this guy’s soul. You just don’t see actors giving you access to somebody’s raw humanity in that way. And it’s such a tiny little moment. Every time it just gets me,” Nolan says. “It’s a later take in a very long series of takes. He had been through a massive emotional roller coaster every time. And so it’s the natural result of that. You feel sorry for him—in a way that you’re not meant to at all, but you do because you’re seeing somebody who’s humiliated themselves.”

Thomas recalled hosting early test screenings for trusted friends and colleagues during the editing process. Some of them didn’t recognize one of the most recognizable actors on the planet. “We had a number of people watch the film not realizing that it was Robert,” she says. “It really speaks to the transformation, the fact that he really lived that character.”

Living is the key. The “back nine” eventually plays out. Every third act has an ending. The challenge is to make it a satisfying one.

The Downeys like to take long beach walks, where they brainstorm and map out the possibilities ahead. A cascade of personal losses in recent years—Susan’s father, lost to Parkinson’s disease in 2020; Robert’s own father, who succumbed to the same illness a year later; and Downey’s close friend and personal assistant Jimmy Rich, who died in a car accident in 2021—can’t help but weigh on such conversations. The ticking clock becomes ever harder to ignore. “You do say, ‘Okay, well, we only have so many years ahead of us, and so many movies ahead of us, or time with our kids,’ ” Susan says. (They share two children, and Downey has an adult son from a previous marriage.) “I do think you become more intentional.”

Downey has spent his life figuring out ways to be himself, to resist things that distort or distract that reality, while finding perhaps the healthiest way to escape his own head—immersing himself in playing somebody else. With Oppenheimer in his rearview, The Sympathizer finished and awaiting release next year, and everything on hold and in flux as Hollywood grapples with its labor conflict, the future is unclear for the actor. What’s next? That’s the question.

It’s not the last question. Not yet. Downey’s third act has already begun, but where it goes from here is still in development.

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the true triumph of robert downey jr.’s second act.

in less than two weeks, Robert Downey Jr. is probably going to win an Academy Award. He’s already taken home the Golden Globe and the SAG Award for his portrayal of Lewis Strauss, the man who decides to get revenge on J. Robert Oppenheimer, in Christopher Nolan ’s acclaimed “ Oppenheimer ,” and there seems to be nothing standing in his way to claiming his first Oscar on March 10th. 

For anyone who has been a fan of Downey over the last several decades, his presumed win will be gratifying—a culmination of a career filled with ups and downs. But for those who remember, it may also be a surreal, poignant moment. Not that long ago, such a scene seemed impossible. It is not hyperbole to say that, at one point, many of us were scared that we’d lose one of the most talented actors of his generation. The Oscar will be deeply satisfying, but maybe not as much as the fact that, after so much struggle and scandal, Downey is in a good place. These stories tend to end in tears. His, happily, has not.

It has now been 25 years since Downey was arguably facing the darkest moment of his life. In the summer of 1999, he was sentenced to a three-year prison term, found guilty of drug and weapons possession. The actor’s addiction issues were well-documented by that point, but Downey’s attorney, Robert Shapiro , asked Judge Lawrence Mira for mercy, insisting Downey had changed. Mira was unconvinced , saying, “I don’t believe your client is committed to not using drugs. You may call that addiction. But there is some level of choice. I don’t think we have any alternative [to jail]. We have used them all.” In the courtroom, Downey described his addiction in vivid, harrowing fashion: “It’s like I’ve got a shotgun in my mouth, with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal.”

Downey ended up serving only one year, but it was easy to imagine that the worst was yet to come. Whether before or after that 1999 sentencing, Gen-Xers had gotten accustomed to their heroes dying due to their demons: River Phoenix , Kurt Cobain , Philip Seymour Hoffman . In the early ‘90s, Downey had received a Best Actor nomination for “ Chaplin ,” a star on the rise, but the second half of that decade was littered with arrests and incidents—the kinds of things that make an actor seem like an out-of-control bad boy destined to do permanent harm to himself. You see it enough, and you get used to the patterns. Sadly resigned, you wait for the other shoe to drop.

His dependency issues had roots in his upbringing, just as his interest in acting had. In that courtroom in 1999, Downey said that he’d been addicted to drugs since he was eight. Downey’s father, independent filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., who had his own addiction battles, later admitted to letting his son smoke a joint when the boy was just six: “I knew I had made a terrible, stupid mistake … Giving a little kid a toke of grass just to be funny.”

The younger Downey had appeared in some of his dad’s movies as a kid, but he started garnering the world’s attention thanks to films like “ Weird Science .” And then he was picked for “Saturday Night Live.” Downey and many of his fellow cast members were dismissed after one season. Sometimes, “SNL” makes bad decisions about who gets cut from the show—Downey would be the first to admit his firing was not one of those instances. “I learned so much in that year about what I wasn’t,” he’d say later . “I was not somebody who was going to come up with a catchphrase. I was not somebody who was going to do impressions. I was somebody who was very ill-suited for rapid-fire sketch comedy.” 

Still, Downey found the energy of live comedy exhilarating, adding, “You get a lot of cred just for being able to even participate in that level of real-time stress and excitement.”

By the late 1980s, he was a legitimate star, his good looks and smart-ass demeanor utilized in romantic comedies like “The Pick-up Artist” and “ Chances Are .” (Considering his role in “Oppenheimer,” it’s amusing to point out that Downey played Albert Einstein in the 1989 mockumentary “That’s Adequate.”) But the most pivotal movie was “ Less Than Zero ,” an adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel that saw him play Julian, a drug addict in a downward spiral. His performance was gripping, but Downey all-too-closely identified with the character. 

“Until that movie, I took my drugs after work and on the weekends,” he’d say later . “Maybe I’d turn up hungover on the set, but no more so than the stuntman. That changed on ‘Less Than Zero.’ … [T]he role was like the ghost of Christmas future. The character was an exaggeration of myself. Then things changed and, in some ways, I became an exaggeration of the character. That lasted far longer than it needed to last.”

Downey’s career continued to blossom in the 1990s: Beyond “Chaplin,” he was superb in Robert Altman ’s ensemble piece “ Short Cuts ” and suitably unhinged in Oliver Stone ’s combustible “ Natural Born Killers .” On screen, he seemed willing to do anything—not bug-eyed crazed like Nicolas Cage but rippling with immediacy and unpredictability—but his drug use was increasingly becoming an issue. Sarah Jessica Parker , whose seven-year relationship with the actor ended in 1991, later admitted of their time together , “It taught me how I love and what’s the difference between loving and taking care of people and what’s necessary and what grown-ups should and shouldn’t do for one [another]. And maybe it taught me a little bit about being a parent, too, because … the way I cared for Downey were things that might be more suitable for a parent.” 

It wasn’t just girlfriends who were concerned: In an interview with Oprah Winfrey , Downey recalled working on 1995’s “Home for the Holidays,” director Jodie Foster taking him aside and saying, “You know you’re doing great on this film, and I know that you’re loaded, too. … I’m worried about you. Not on this one, because we’re almost done and you’re going to be okay, and I know you have a really strong work ethic and you’re kind of like a lab rat. You’re really resilient. That’s not a good thing in this situation. I’m worried about you for the next movie.”

Foster’s worries were well-founded. The following year was a period in which Downey kept getting in trouble with the law. Arrested three times in the summer of 1996, he was busted for (among other things) possession of cocaine and heroin. The frequency of his arrests quickly eviscerated his reputation, leaving former reps fearing the worst. Loree Rodkin, his one-time manager, told People that summer, “Every day I look in the newspaper, and I think that I am going to read Robert’s obituary.” 

In 1997, he was sentenced to six months in prison because of a violation of his probation. (In the interim, he’d made headlines a few more times, including being arrested on a narcotics charge after he’d broken into a neighbor’s house and fallen asleep in a child’s bedroom.) The judge who sentenced Downey to the six-month term was Mira, who you may remember ruled a few years later that the actor go to prison for three years. Mira had watched Downey try and fail to turn his life around: Back in 1997, he told Downey , “I’m going to incarcerate you, and I’m going to incarcerate you in a way that’s very unpleasant for you. I don’t care who you are. What I care about is that there is a life to be saved from drugs.” 

Downey was apologetic then as well, saying, “I don’t know why … the severity and the fear … of you, of death and of not being able to live a life free of drugs has not been enough to make me not continually relapse … again. I really need to do this, even if I don’t want to, I need to.”

Getting released early from prison after the 1999 sentencing didn’t do any good: He was arrested twice in the next year, leading to him being sent to a rehab facility. (It had not been Downey’s first such visit.) Around the same time, he won a Golden Globe after being cast on “Ally McBeal,” but he said in 2003 , “I’m probably not the best person to ask about that period. It was my lowest point in terms of addictions. At that stage, I didn’t give a fuck whether I ever acted again.” And yet, there were great performances: He’s funny in “ Bowfinger ” and “ Wonder Boys ,” and there are those who think the 2003 cult classic “ The Singing Detective ” is the best thing he’s ever done. 

But that was also the year he finally got serious about getting sober. His second wife, Susan, whom he met when she produced his film “ Gothika ,” gave him (in Downey’s words) an “ultimatum,” which started him down the road to staying clean. In his Winfrey interview, Downey admitted, “You think [overcoming addiction is] supposed to get more and more dramatic, it’s not a movie. It’s real life. For me, I just happened to be in a situation the very last time and I said, ‘You know what? I don’t think I can continue doing this.’ And I reached out for help and I ran with it, you know? … It’s really not that difficult to overcome these seemingly ghastly problems. … What’s hard is to decide.”

I’m lucky never to have dealt with addiction, or to have anyone close to me who has, so I can’t pretend to know how complicated sobriety can be. But even so, I imagine it was much more challenging than Downey lets on. What’s undeniable is that, since getting sober in 2003, his career rebounded, even reached new heights. Whether it’s the R-rated crime comedy “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” or his role in the stirring drama “ Good Night, and Good Luck ,” he suddenly conveyed a weightier presence than he’d shown in his younger years. His turn as “Zodiac’s” haunted investigative reporter Paul Avery is arguably his finest hour — Downey’s trademark sardonic humor mixing with something far bleaker and emotional — and he’s a hoot in “A Scanner Darkly,” tapping into that dark comedy’s paranoid vibe. 

But no movie of that era—not even “ Tropic Thunder ,” which earned him his second Oscar nomination and spurred ongoing debate about whether his satiric blackface performance was inappropriate—defined his comeback more than 2008’s “ Iron Man .” Released the same summer as Nolan’s “ The Dark Knight ,” the other comic-book movie that changed the industry, “Iron Man” was no sure thing, with Downey (not that far removed from his legal issues) hardly an A-list superstar. But director Jon Favreau stuck by him, and the two men helped make the Marvel Cinematic Universe the biggest thing in Hollywood. There was a period when Downey was practically unemployable. ( Mel Gibson , his “Air America” co-star, put up the money to help insure Downey for “The Singing Detective,” a favor that—no matter Gibson’s many abhorrent acts—has kept Downey forever grateful to his friend .) But now, all of a sudden, Downey was cinema’s most important star.

Flash-forwarding to today, when superhero fatigue is starting to feel permanent, it can be hard to appreciate how meaningful Downey was to the MCU. Ironically, years earlier, “SNL” had hired him and others in the hopes that established actors would help revitalize the struggling show—in a sense, that’s what Downey actually did for Marvel, giving it an instant legitimacy. When other Oscar nominees (like Mark Ruffalo ) or respected indie stars (such as Scarlett Johansson ) started signing up for the MCU, it wasn’t so shocking. Alongside Nolan’s Batman films, which had earned Heath Ledger a posthumous Oscar, the Marvel films sought the best actors in the world to sell the drama within the blockbuster spectacle. 

But other actors came and went in superhero movies. Some, like Chris Evans , openly lamented the demands of stardom. Not Downey: From “Iron Man” to his heroic death in 2019’s “ Avengers: Endgame ,” he was front and center. At MCU premieres, he always spoke last. He was the team captain. It wasn’t simply Tony Stark’s death that irrevocably changed the franchise’s future—it was the fact that Robert Downey Jr. wasn’t part of the MCU anymore that made the difference. Those movies’ heart—their upstart energy—was gone. Five years later, Kevin Feige is still trying to find a worthy replacement. 

Since exiting the MCU, Downey has kept working, never badmouthing the Iron Man years but also wanting to create a little distance. As he once put it , “I am not my work. I am not what I did with that studio. I am not that period of time that I spent playing this character.” Some of those post-Marvel projects have been disastrous—even on a bet, avoid “ Dolittle ”—but others were clearly personal. 

Working with prolific documentarian Chris Smith (“ American Movie ,” “ Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond ”), Downey decided to make a tribute to his father. “Sr.” chronicled Robert Downey Sr.’s filmmaking career, but its most affecting moments came from the two men simply talking, the son asking his dad about his life. There’s no grand catharsis—no moment of riveting candor in which they tearfully hash out their shared battles with addiction—but it’s clear that part of their bond was formed by what Sr. had introduced into Jr.’s world by giving him that joint so long ago. Downey Sr., who has Parkinson’s in the film, died in 2021, more than a year before the documentary’s release, and “Sr.” feels like a melancholy farewell to a father from his boy, who struggled as much as the old man with demons. But it also feels like the closing of a chapter for Downey, with a new one about to be written.

“Oppenheimer” was the first movie Downey made after his dad’s passing , his connection to some of the film’s New Mexico locations stemming from spending time there with his dad when he was a teenager . After working on the documentary and taking an acting hiatus , Downey got back in front of the camera to play a man so unlike himself—or, at least, the men he usually portrays. Strauss is deeply insecure and petty, his arrogance belying his smallness. Lacking any sense of humor, Strauss is the villain, the Salieri trying to take down his personal Mozart. Where Downey’s characters tend to be highly verbal, almost hyperactive, Strauss was hushed, unanimated. Tony Stark was triumphant—Lewis Strauss is humiliated in the most public fashion imaginable. Robert Downey Jr. returned to cinemas, but he wasn’t the man we remembered.

As awards talk has focused on Downey over these last few months, it was easy to see why he’d be a front-runner. After years making superhero films, the once-rising actor’s actor had refocused his talents on serious drama. But anyone who’s loved Downey knows the comeback narrative goes much further back—and is far more fraught. 

I distinctly remember his “gun metal” line in 1999, mentally making peace back then with the fact that he might not be with us much longer. Movie stars aren’t our friends, but if we watch them long enough on the big screen, we feel like we know them. And they can break our hearts. A decade later, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death still bothers me—the tragedy of it, the senselessness of it, the power of addiction, the incalculable loss. Downey seemed fated to go down the same path. 

When stars die too young, we lament what could have been—what incredible performances they might have gifted us with. Assuming Downey does win the Oscar, it will be the capper on a happy ending that is not, in fact, over. We don’t have to wonder what Downey might have done if he’d gotten sober. He has, and we have his terrific turn in “Oppenheimer” as a result. We’re living in a future we’d not dared to believe was possible.

Tim Grierson

Tim Grierson is the Senior U.S. Critic for  Screen International . 

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Robert downey jr. reflects on life after iron man: “i am not my work”.

Robert Downey Jr. is opening up about leaving the security of Marvel Studios after 'Avengers: Endgame.'

By Aaron Couch

Aaron Couch

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Robert Downey Jr. completed the role of a lifetime with Avengers: Endgame , in which he said goodbye to Tony Stark, the character he’d played since 2008’s Iron Man and who brought him levels of success that seemed unimaginable when he took on the role.

Downey has kept a relatively low public profile in the months since the film’s release, but now is reflecting on the next stage of his life in a new interview with Off Camera With Sam Jones .

“I have not been forced to explore the new frontier of what is my creative and personal life after this,” Downey said. “It’s always good to get ahead of where you are about to be. If you put eyes on ‘that’s going to be a big turn down there, spring of ’19,’ I better start psychically getting on top of that. … It’s always in the transitions between one phase and the next phase that people fall apart.”

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Coming up in January, Downey has The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle , a potential franchise starter that underwent extensive reshoots earlier this year. He also as Sherlock Holmes 3 due out in December 2021.

Thanks to backend profit participation, Downey turned heads by earning $50 million for 2012’s Avengers , and he made as much as $75 million for Infinity War . Though Downey did not discuss his paydays in his interview with Sam Jones, the actor noted he is now in uncharted waters following the success of the MCU.

“There’s always a dependency on something that feels like a sure thing. It’s the closest I will ever come to being a trust-fund kid,” Downey said of his time with Disney’s Marvel Studios.

At times during his Marvel run, it might have appeared to outsiders that Downey’s public persona and Tony Stark were merging.

“Initially, by creating and associating and synergizing with Tony Stark and the Marvel Universe … and being a good company man, but also being a little off-kilter, being creative and getting into all these other partnerships, it was a time when … what do they say? Owners start looking like their pets,” said Downey.

In order to maintain his own identity, he drew upon his theatrical training, which taught him the notion of “aesthetic distance” from the characters you play.

“I am not my work. I am not what I did with that studio. I am not that period of time that I spent playing this character,” said Downey. “And it sucks, because the kid in all of us wants to be like, ‘No. It’s always going to be summer camp and we’re all holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya.'”

In the original Iron Man , Tony Stark built a suit out of scraps in a cave, creating something that he hoped would get him far enough for the cavalry to come in and save him. It was an act of self-preservation, noted Downey. In Endgame , Tony wielded an Infinity Gauntlet he built at great personal cost — completing Tony’s journey.

“The last [Iron Man suit] is not designed to be able to do its job and have you make it past this. That’s the great Joseph Campbell mythology of it,” said Downey.

You can watch more from Downey below.

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Robert Downey Jr. to Make Broadway Debut in Ayad Akhtar Play

The Oscar-winning actor will star as an A.I.-curious author in “McNeal,” starting performances in September at Lincoln Center Theater.

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By Michael Paulson

Robert Downey Jr., who earlier this year won an Academy Award, will make his Broadway debut this fall in “McNeal,” a new drama by the Pulitzer-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar.

The play is about a gifted novelist with a difficult family life and a potentially problematic interest in artificial intelligence. Downey will play the writer.

The production is being staged by Lincoln Center Theater, one of four nonprofits with Broadway houses, at its Vivian Beaumont Theater. Previews are to begin Sept. 5, and the opening is scheduled for Sept. 30.

“McNeal” will be directed by Bartlett Sher, a resident director at Lincoln Center Theater and a Tony winner for “South Pacific.”

Downey, 59, has been a prolific and enormously successful film actor, overcoming significant challenges (he had a long battle with substance abuse and served time in prison on drug charges). He has built a career that has been lucrative (he starred as Iron Man in multiple Marvel movies) and acclaimed (he won the Oscar for best supporting actor for a widely praised performance as Lewis Strauss, a government official, in “Oppenheimer”).

His stage experience is limited — his one Off Broadway credit, “ American Passion ,” opened and closed on the same date in 1983 — and he said in a statement, “It’s been 40 years since I was last on ‘the boards,’ but hopefully I’ll knock the dust off quick.”

Akhtar is a playwright and a novelist with an appetite for complex and thorny subjects whose previous plays have explored finance and Islam. He has had a long relationship with Lincoln Center Theater, which first produced his Pulitzer-winning play, “ Disgraced ,” on its Off Off Broadway stage, and also presented his plays “ The Who & The What ” Off Off Broadway and “ Junk ” on Broadway.

Akhtar is also working on a musical: He is one of the book writers for a stage adaptation of the film “La La Land” that is now in development.

Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times. More about Michael Paulson

Robert Downey Jr. to Make Broadway Debut in New Play, ‘McNeal’

By Rebecca Rubin

Rebecca Rubin

Senior Film and Media Reporter

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Robert Downey Jr . will make his Broadway debut this fall in the new play, “ McNeal .”

Written by Ayad Akhtar and directed by Bartlett Sher (“To Kill a Mockingbird”), “McNeal” will star Downey as a talented writer who struggles with family issues as he works on his next novel. According to the official synopsis, “Good writers borrow, great writers steal. Jacob McNeal (Downey) is a great writer, one of our greatest, a perpetual candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. But McNeal also has an estranged son, a new novel, old axes to grind and an unhealthy fascination with Artificial Intelligence.”

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Downey recently won the first Oscar of his career for Christopher Nolan’s historical epic “Oppenheimer,” in which he played Lewis Strauss. The “Iron Man” star will appear next (in various villainous roles) in HBO’s adaptation of “The Sympathizer” and Paramount’s “Vertigo” remake.

Akhtar won a Pulitzer Prize winner for “Disgraced” and has also written the plays “Junk,” “The Who & the What” and “The Invisible Hand.”

Sher, who scored a Tony for Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” has been a resident director at Lincoln Center since 2008, where his work includes “The Light in the Piazza,” “The King & I,” “Oslo,” “My Fair Lady” and most recently “Camelot.” His other directorial efforts on Broadway and the West End include “Pictures From Home,” “The Bridges of Madison County” and “Fiddler on the Roof.”

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Robert Downey Jr. To Make Broadway Debut This Fall In Ayad Akhtar’s New Play ‘McNeal’

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Robert Downey Jr. will make his his Broadway debut in the lead role of McNeal , the new play by Ayad Akhtar, author of the Tony-nominated Junk and the Pulitzer-winner Disgraced .

Downey will play the title character Jacob McNeal in the production staged by Lincoln Center Theater and directed by Bartlett Sher ( To Kill A Mockingbird) .

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The official synopsis: “Good writers borrow, great writers steal. Jacob McNeal is a great writer, one of our greatest, a perpetual candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. But McNeal also has an estranged son, a new novel, old axes to grind and an unhealthy fascination with Artificial Intelligence. Pulitzer Prize-winner Ayad Akhtar’s new play is a startling and wickedly smart examination of the inescapable humanity – and increasing inhumanity – of the stories we tell.”

McNeal will have sets by Michael Yeargan & Jake Barton, costumes by Jennifer Moeller, lighting by Donald Holder, sound by Justin Ellington & Beth Lake, and projections by Jake Barton. McNeal is produced by Lincoln Center Theater in association with Team Downey.

Downey, of course, is the Academy Award-winning actor ( Oppenheimer ) whose film credits include Iron Man, Tropic Thunder and Chaplin, among many others. McNeal will mark his first time on Broadway.

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Robert Downey Jr. Returns to the Stage After 40 Years With Broadway Debut

He will play a prolific writer fascinated by AI.

The Big Picture

• Robert Downey Jr. is making his Broadway debut in McNeal , a play written by Pulitzer prize winner Ayad Akhtar.
• The limited-run play will be performed at the Lincoln Center Theater in New York, directed by Bartlett Sher.
• After his iconic role in the MCU, Downey Jr. continues to showcase his talent on stage and in upcoming projects like The Sympathizer .

Former MCU star, Robert Downey Jr is set to make his Broadway debut this year. The actor will be playing the lead character in McNeal , written by Pulitzer prize winner Ayad Akhtar . The Guardian reported that the play will be performed at the Lincoln Center Theater in New York for a limited run. McNeal's official synopsis reads:

"Good writers borrow, great writers steal. Jacob McNeal is a great writer, one of our greatest, and a perpetual candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. But McNeal also has an estranged son, a new novel, old axes to grind and an unhealthy fascination with Artificial Intelligence. Pulitzer Prize-winner Ayad Akhtar’s new play is a startling and wickedly smart examination of the inescapable humanity – and increasing inhumanity – of the stories we tell.”

Akhtar has written numerous plays in the past, such as Junk , The Who & the What , and The Invisible Hand . The playwright won a 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his work on Disgraced . McNeal will be directed by Tony Award winner, Bartlett Sher , known for his work for South Pacific , To Kill a Mockingbird , and The Light in the Piazza.

According to The Guardian, the actor released a statement about the latest casting announcement, stating it's been a long time since he was last seen on stage, but it shouldn't deter him from giving an excellent performance.

“It’s been 40 years since I was last on ‘the boards’, but hopefully I’ll knock the dust off quick,” said Downey Jr.

At the moment, Downey Jr is the only one attached to the project and an official cast list has yet to be announced. Variety reported that the play will begin previews on Sept 5 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater and its limited run will end on November 24.

Robert Downey Jr's Legendary Career

Downey Jr is mostly known for his role as Tony Stark in the MCU. He made his Marvel debut in the 2008 film, Iron Man and made his final appearance in 2019's Avengers: Endgame . Outside the superhero genre, the actor recently made strides in his performance in Christopher Nolan 's Oppenheimer and won "Best Supporting Actor" during the 2024 Academy Awards for his role as Lewis Strauss. He has also appeared in numerous projects, including Dolittle , and Tropic Thunder , just to name a few. When it comes to stage plays, his last performance was in 1983 for the off-Broadway production American Passion . Downey Jr is set to star in the upcoming HBO Max's TV series, The Sympathizer . Oppenheimer is streaming now on Peacock.

Oppenheimer

The story of American scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.

Watch on Peacock

Inside the Prosthetics for Robert Downey Jr.'s Multiple ‘The Sympathizer' Roles

Robert Downey Jr.'s brilliant string of roles in HBO's "The Sympathizer" (streaming Sundays on HBO) is a tour de force reminiscent of Peter Sellers' legendary turns in "Dr. Strangelove." But Downey does Sellers one better by portraying four characters that serve as interconnected projections of American patriarchy to the Captain (Hoa Xuan Nguyen), a Vietnamese double agent with a severe identity crisis.

After the fall of Saigon, the Captain is forced to flee to the U.S. to continue his post-war mission. He winds up in L.A., where he continues interacting with Claude, a pop music-loving CIA operative, and his college mentor, Hammer, a gay East Asian studies professor who sponsors him. In addition, the Captain gets introduced to Ned Godwin, a military vet-turned-congressman, and Niko, a counter-culture film director, who hires him as a consultant for his Vietnam War epic (inspired by Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now").

For prosthetics designer Vincent Van Dyke (owner of VVDFX and an Emmy winner for "Star Trek: Picard"), the prospect of transforming Downey into four characters was initially daunting. "The task here was to [establish] this baseline of Robert that was identifiable throughout the characters, and to keep this connection there that these are the same [actor]," Van Dyke told IndieWire.

But they were under the gun for time, and the looks needed to get established and tested very quickly. Luckily, Van Dyke had recently obtained a scan of Downey for another project. "So I took all of these sculptures and lined them up on a table in the front of my studio," he said. "Everybody was there and I was gloved up and ready with clay and would start making those changes right then and there while director Park [Chan-wook] was making these notes. And by the end of the session, we were able to have sign off on each of those sculptural looks, so we could start testing the makeups in one day. I had never done that before."

The makeup applications were done in an hour by two Emmy winners: prosthetics makeup artist Michael Mekash ("Stranger Things") and key makeup FX artist Chris Burgoyne ("John Adams"). "I think one of the elements that's so interesting about A24 projects is that they love to make the audience do a little work," Mekash told IndieWire. "I kept thinking that Robert was getting to live out those fantasy roles he was doing in ‘Tropic Thunder.'"

Meanwhile, Katherine Kousakis ("Everything Everywhere All At Once") led the hair department. Her wig fittings took 15 minutes, made easier by Downey going bald for Hammer. "We had talked about maybe doing like some sort of male pattern baldness with the professor," Kousakis told IndieWire. "But I just thought the look of a fully bald head was so striking that I was really hoping and pushing for that. And [Robert] was on board. So we would just shave his head down every single day for all characters and then build on that."

Claude, the CIA Agent

"Claude was definitely the most difficult to nail down and evolved all the way up until the first couple of days of shooting," said Van Dyke. "His very first initial tests were very different than where we ended up landing on him, with fire red hair that became ginger, lightening his eye color, giving him a cauliflower ear, and adding freckles."

"We knew he had this kind of tough background," Van Dyke added. "He may have gotten into some fights, he may have seen some shit. We talked about him maybe having a broken nose at one point that was reset, giving him a little bit more of a structured jaw…and we gave him muscular biceps. But, at the same time, he also had this kind of elegance and softness to him."

Downey was given a nose piece that covered his whole bridge and then blended into his cheek slightly, and captured a little bit of nostril. He also had some jaw pieces on either side that gave him an asymmetrical look. He additionally had contact lenses, the complexion change, and a full lace wig.

"Robert came up with the idea of creating more of an angular face, and he was absolutely right," Burgoyne told IndieWire." He also came up with the idea of being quite freckled and was kind of looking at my freckling and wanted to go at least 50 percent more."

The curly hair was Downey's idea, inspired by the look of a friend. "We were pushing and pushing and pushing until we got such a weird, really far setback hairline," Kousakis added.

Hammer, the Professor

For Hammer, they went with an older, rounder, weathered look. He's got elongated ear lobes, a wide nose, large nostrils, and little eye bag pieces. Later additions included tea-stained teeth and a port wine stain on his head. "I started making some sculptural changes because I noticed that when Robert embodied this character, he would purse his lips together and it would cause a little compression," Van Dyke said. "So I really wanted to play into that with these jowls to make sure it worked."

There was also body padding and body modification pieces, and we get to see the character exposed and marred by a mysterious scar across his abdomen. "That's where Robert, being a wonderful collaborator, was all for giving him this really big, gnarly scar," Van Dyke added.

"Robert's description of that scar was that he had a botched emergency surgery in some third-world country," added Mekash.

Godwin, the Congressman

For Godwin, they wanted a clean-cut, quintessential politician look. Downey offered notes about him being from Orange County: charming on the surface but, basically, soulless and untrustworthy. "And so I thought: ‘Why not make his eyes dark brown? So much so that they almost read black in certain lighting conditions,'" said Van Dyke. "We ran with that and tried different variants of contact lenses. I thought it was very effective, along with the old-school political smile, and chiclet teeth.

His hair, meanwhile, was conservative with a standard part on the side. "We really only had to discuss the color, which we all agreed was gray, to make sure that it showed the age," Kousakis said.

Then they came up with the idea of giving Godwin a burned hand from the Korean War. "It's a great little detail that helps tell the story of this character," Van Dyke added. "And so we did this top-of-the-hand burn prosthetic piece that gave him some really nice webbing and scarring that went up his fingers and all on the back of the hand."

Niko, the Director

Niko, the hippie director with grandiose visions of making the ultimate Vietnam War film, was distinguished by a more subtle makeup design. While Downey appears to be channeling his director father, Robert Downey ("Putney Swope"), the visual model that came up early was Dustin Hoffman. "I wanted to him to have this kind of large, distinct nose and a mole, and olive skin, and we played around with different facial hair on him [giving him long sideburns]," Van Dyke said. "And we gave him a really nice hairy chest and then this loose, wild, curly brown hair. We wanted him to have this sex appeal."

"I'm Greek on both sides and I always saw him with brown curly hair," added Kousakis. "Lengthwise, we started [long] and then we brought it up so that we could show his ears. It's going to be a little more trendy. Robert and I both thought that's it."

All Together Now

In Episode 3 ("Love It or Leave It"), all four characters appear together in a restaurant with the Captain. This was shot over three days in downtown L.A. with Downey performing two characters a day.

"Doing multiple characters on a day, it's just a matter of switching as quickly as possible," Kousakis said. "Getting all the glue off, cleaning them up, getting it back down. They would paint in up into his hairline, so you can't touch any of the paint that they've just done."

"It was an interesting setup and was quite fun, but another sidebar was that there were stand-ins playing the other characters during the restaurant scene," Mekash added. "We kind of made them up a bit, too, just to have the essence of those characters. But because they had been watching Robert play the characters intermittently around the table, they all kind of took on some of his personalities just to give him something to work with when he was playing [opposite them]."

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RFK Jr. says he suffered from a parasitic brain worm and mercury poisoning

By Allison Novelo

Updated on: May 9, 2024 / 9:24 AM EDT / CBS News

The campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , the independent running for president, confirmed Wednesday that he contracted a parasite in his brain over a decade ago. 

His campaign's comment came after The New York Times reported he said in a 2012 deposition that a parasitic worm "ate a portion" of his brain and may have caused cognitive issues. 

Kennedy campaign spokesperson Stefanie Spear said in a statement to CBS News that he contracted a parasite after traveling "extensively in Africa, South America and Asia as his work as an environmental advocate."

"The issue was resolved more than 10 years ago, and he is in robust physical and mental health. Questioning Mr. Kennedy's health is a hilarious suggestion, given his competition," Spear said. 

Kennedy quipped in a post on X Wednesday, "I offer to eat 5 more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate."

During a deposition given by Kennedy in 2012 amid his divorce from his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, The Times reports he stated that he faced "cognitive problems" and experienced memory loss and brain fog, leading one doctor to say he had a dead parasite in his brain in 2010. 

The Times reported that Kennedy said in the deposition that a friend pushed him to seek out medical care after noticing his cognitive issues, initially thinking Kennedy might be suffering from a brain tumor. 

It is possible that Kennedy could have contracted a parasitic worm in his brain, according to a medical expert, although it wouldn't have been "eating his brain." However, parasites such as tapeworms do not consume brain tissue, as Kennedy suggested during his deposition.

Tapeworm infections, or neurocysticercosis, can be contracted from consuming undercooked pork or drinking contaminated water, particularly in regions with poor sanitation such as parts of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. When individuals ingest tapeworm eggs, these can travel through the bloodstream and infest various organs including the brain, muscles, liver and other tissues.

Symptoms can include nausea, headaches and seizures, said CBS News medical contributor Dr. Celine Gounder on "CBS Mornings,"  although many people who suffer from this type of infection may not see symptoms. 

Treatment for tapeworm infection typically involves medications such as anti-parasitic drugs to kill the worms.

In some cases, if the worm dies, the body's immune system may clear the dead worm from the brain tissue without requiring surgery, unless complications arise. It's unclear whether Kennedy underwent surgery for this diagnosis, though he informed the Times in a recent interview that he has fully recovered from the memory loss and brain fogginess and has experienced no other lingering effects. He also mentioned that no treatment was necessary for the parasitic condition.

According to The Times, during Kennedy's 2012 deposition, he also reported having been diagnosed with mercury poisoning, which he said was the result of a diet heavy on tuna and other fish. He reportedly said, "I have cognitive problems, clearly. I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me."

Memory loss is more commonly associated with mercury poisoning than with a parasitic worm, experts say.

Kennedy told the paper that he attributed his mercury poisoning diagnosis to his diet. He said medical tests showed his mercury levels were 10 times what the Environmental Protection Agency considers safe.

" I loved tuna fish sandwiches. I ate them all the time," Kennedy said to The Times.

Kennedy has long been an outspoken activist against vaccines containing thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that was phased out of childhood vaccines two decades ago, falsely linking vaccinations in children to a rise in autism and other medical conditions. There is no evidence to suggest that low doses of thimerosal causes harm to people, but an excess consumption of mercury, found in fish, can be toxic to humans.

And while both parasitic infections and mercury poisoning can lead to long-term brain damage, it is also possible to make a full recovery, experts say.

Allison Novelo is a 2024 campaign reporter for CBS News.

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