Down Time
The bad boy actor on doing drugs with his dad, finding the love of a good woman and his recent string of hits
Words by James Mottram
If anything, it dawned on him during the making of his latest film The Soloist. On one particular day, a very special guest dropped by – Steven Spielberg. Despite a Hollywood career that stretches back a quarter century, Downey was left star-struck. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says, almost bouncing off the walls with enthusiasm when we meet in London. “He’s over by the monitors, and I’m like, ‘Jesus Christ, there he is!’ and he talks to me about a couple of things, and then he leaves the set and I’m like, ‘God darn it!’ I’ve only been waiting 25 years for one of those moments.”
A few years ago, Spielberg might well have crossed the street to avoid Downey. A repeat drug offender, he has emerged from two spells in prison with a rap sheet Eminem would envy. While he jokingly calls himself “the poster boy for pharmaceutical mismanagement”, his addictions have ravaged his career, his finances, his relationships and his reputation. In reality, he is fortunate not to have gone the way of the character he played in 1987′s Less Than Zero, who winds up dead after taking a deadly cocktail of cocaine and heroin.
In place of death, Downey suffered a decade of what he calls “public humiliation”, with a series of events that have become entrenched in Hollywood folklore. Most famously, in Malibu in 1996 occurred what became known as ‘the Goldilocks incident’ when an unconscious Downey was found by his neighbours sleeping in their 11-year-old son’s bed. Just a month earlier, he had been pulled over for speeding by a traffic cop, who had found him in possession of heroin, cocaine and a .357 magnum, which led him to receive a suspended sentence of three years. Then 31, this was reportedly his first brush with the law – but by Christmas 1997 he was condemned to 180 days in a Los Angeles jail for violating his probation. As he told the judge, “I have no excuses. I find myself defenceless.”
STRUGGLING WITH LEGAL BILLS, DOWNEY HAD ALREADY LOST HIS HOUSE IN MALIBU AND HIS RANGE ROVER BUT WORSE WAS TO COME. A year-and-a-half later, after several parole violations, he was sentenced to three years and spent nearly 12 months of that inside. He shared a cell with five other inmates, waking at 6am, working in the kitchens, undergoing four hours of drug counselling a day.
At rock bottom, it still took him another four years before he finally cleaned up. I wonder what he’s learnt, now he can look at the world with sober eyes. “Research complete. All of my data is in,” he says, smiling between sips from a tellingly pure bottle of water. “It’s a really tough and shitty road to be obsessive about anything. In some cases [it lasts] a long period of time. And then you know what? It just stops.”
In Downey’s case, it began in his childhood when his father, underground filmmaker Robert Downey Snr, offered his young son his first puff of a marijuana joint aged only eight. Born in Greenwich Village in New York, it didn’t help Downey’s sense of stability that the family moved several times around the country (a psychiatrist once told the actor he had been “raised by a pack of wolves”). After his parents divorced when he was 13, Downey found that narcotics became an emotional bond between father and son. “When my dad and I would do drugs together, it was like him trying to express his love for me in the only way he knew how.”
Yet through all this, Downey also discovered film thanks to his father, who cast him as a puppy when he was five in his 1970 film Pound. “He was the original and I would not be doing this if not for him.” Whatever their differences, it’s evident Downey – now a father himself, to 15-year-old son Indio, from his marriage to actress Deborah Falconer – has great affection for the man. Leaning back on his chair, Downey recalls his entry in a book called The Film Snob’s Dictionary. “They call him a ‘hippie film director’.” He breaks into a laugh as he compares himself to his father. “I know I wasn’t. I had my f*****g hair spiked up, snorting coke and f*****g driving a Porsche. the last thing I was was a hippie.”
This arrogance of youth, coupled with that feeling of invincibility youngsters have evidently stayed with Downey – much to his cost.
Upon release from his stint in prison, he was cast in the hit-show Ally McBeal, as the female lawyer’s boyfriend. But despite winning a Golden Globe for the role, and boosting the show’s ratings by 11 percent, it didn’t matter. In November 2000, police received an anonymous tip-off that Downey had cocaine and methamphetamines in his hotel room.
The following April he was arrested for being under the influence of a controlled substance after being found wandering in an alley. Not surprisingly his tenure on Ally McBeal was terminated shortly afterwards.
While he evaded further jail time due to Proposition 36, a measure that mandates treatment – rather than prison – for many offenders in California, Downey was still facing bankruptcy. Virtually unemployable, due to being uninsurable on a movie set, he only survived due to the kindness of friends. Mel Gibson, for example, paid the insurance bond himself in order that Downey could star in his 2003 film production of Dennis Potter’s television classic The Singing Detective. But, now sober, Downey gradually began to prove that he was no longer a risk. Celebrated directors – David Fincher (Zodiac), Richard Linklater (A Scanner Darkly) and George Clooney (Good Night, and Good Luck) – flocked to work with him.
Then came last year’s Iron Man. Based around Marvel Comics superhero Tony Stark, it was a massive hit, taking $585 million across the globe. All of a sudden, Downey was Hollywood’s hottest property – a fact that was long overdue. He followed it by starring in Ben Stiller’s hit comedy Tropic Thunder, playing an Australian actor who dyes his skin black to play an African-American soldier in a Vietnam war movie. Entirely controversial, it was just as Downey liked it – and his reward this year was an Oscar nomination, only the second of his career after he was up for Best Actor for 1992′s Chaplin. “I really feel like this is the most fertile time in my whole career,” he says, “and I want to stay hungry.”
THAT’S NO DOUBT WHY DOWNEY NOW APPEARS AS LEAN AS HE DOES. His tight brown T-shirt and equally tight pair of black jeans show off a body that has been kept in trim with a mixture of Pilates, Eastern philosophy, meditation and Wing Chun Kung Fu. With his skin tanned, his black hair clipped and neat and his dark eyes glistening, he looks far younger than his 44 years. If the realisation of impending middle age causes him to utter “Urgh!” at one point, his recent rush of action roles leaves you with the impression that he’s still very much in his prime. “It’s great,” he acknowledges. “It’s a time when you return to that very warrior part of yourself.” And no one can argue: this is one man ready to fight.
Still, just as his nervy, rapid-fire speech patterns and frequent digressions recall the scattershot mind of a recovering addict, Downey seems unwilling to forget his past. Almost destined to relive his darker times on screen, he’s recently played alcoholics in Charlie Bartlett
and Zodiac, and a junkie in A Scanner Darkly. In The Soloist, he plays real-life Los Angeles Times journalist Steve Lopez, who befriends Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless schizophrenic man (played by Jamie Foxx) who is also a virtuoso violinist.
But The Soloist is more than just a Rain Man-style film designed for Oscar glory. Through writing about Ayers in his column, Lopez highlighted the plight of LA’s 7,000 homeless – and the film strives to do the same. British-born director Joe Wright (Atonement) hired real-life members of Los Angeles’s Skid Row Community to play extras in the film. Typical of his verbal flourishes, Downey explains that spending three months with the slum-dwellers was a humbling experience. “Those people are us, so it was like working with us in very trying circumstances,” he says. “The only way I can describe it is what was it like having dinner with a family during the siege on Stalingrad, you know?”
While he never clarifies his rather oblique metaphor, he’s very succinct when I ask how he think he’s survived. “I know exactly how – I grew up and got married,” he explains. “With the right girl. You gotta get the right girl.” In 2005, Downey did just that, marrying producer Susan Levin. It’s evident married life has finally made him responsible. “I think accountability is good but I think the most important ingredient is humility,” he argues. “Humility is just an honest assessment to adjust rightly to what is really happening.”
Now known as Susan Downey, his wife is currently producing her husband’s next potential hit – Sherlock Holmes. Directed by Guy Ritchie, the film stars Downey as Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic Victorian sleuth opposite Jude Law as faithful sidekick Dr Watson. Of course, it’s quite an irony that Downey is once again playing an addict. But despite the detective’s penchant for opium, Downey claims this won’t be played up in what is more of a family affair. “I don’t know if you want the kids to buy the action figures of Holmes and Watson lying on their sides sharing a Hookah tube!” he grins.
With Sherlock Holmes due at Christmas, Downey will then follow that with Iron Man 2. Remarkably, it’s his first ever sequel and he’s taken the film “probably more seriously than any movie I’ve ever done,” he says. “It’s very daunting because I feel the expectation of the millions of people who watched it and enjoyed it.” But he believes both films will deliver – not least because he feels he’s in touch with audiences. “People are inundated in the information age,” he pronounces, “and what they want is something that’s a new flavour.” Like a clean and sober Downey? No wonder we’re lapping him up again.
The Soloist opens on 25 September nationally – or watch now on our longhaul flights. Sherlock Holmes will be released on 26 December
