Robert Downey Jr. Told Us What It Took to Finally Win an Oscar
It's no secret that Robert Downey Jr. is one of Hollywood's greatest living actors. After his legendary run as Iron Man, as well as his performances in Sherlock Holmes, Tropic Thunder, and Chaplin, the man finally has his flowers. At the 95th Academy Awards,Downey Jr. won Best Supporting Actor for his brilliant turn as Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer. In Esquire’s new cover story—which just so happens to feature Downey Jr.—the 59-year-old actor told us what it took to win an Oscar.
“I knew that playing Strauss in Oppenheimer was going to be like picking fly shit out of pepper,” he said. “That it was going to be extremely exacting, that it was going to be... not confining, but liberating by its varied implicit limitations of what my usual toolbox is.” How exacting was Downey Jr., exactly? Well, Downey Jr. owns signed copy of his character’s 1962 book, Men and Decisions. “I’m still diving into Strauss’s book,” the actor Esquire.
Downey Jr. had more to say about Strauss in the latest episode of Esquire's “Explain This.” He said: “There are very few things I didn’t like about him. He was a lifelong public servant. I think he was, actually, a hugely principled person, and if I had to say something I dislike about him, I think that he allowed these imagined slights and petty rivalries to get the better of him, and it may or may not have informed some of those decisions he made.”
As for pulling Oppenheimer together alongside the great Christopher Nolan? “The focus was so intense to the exclusion of anything that could be deemed a distraction—as it needed to be,” Downey Jr. continued. “I think [given] the subject matter, we felt the onus of getting it right.”
Of course, this is Robert Downey Jr.—he left us with a joke. “It was hard because you realize you really had to nail it as much as you could from the beginning of every day to the end of every day, which is not how I like to work,” he said. “I like to fuck around indefinitely and waste the studio's money.”
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