Robert Downey Jr. Almost Had a Very Different Comeback Story

Famously, Iron Man and the Marvel Cinematic Universe played a major part in Robert Downey Jr.’s comeback story. But in another timeline, the Oscar nominee may have had a very different career if he had worked with director Christopher Nolan before last year’s cinematic hit, Oppenheimer.

In Oppenheimer, Downey Jr. played Lewis Strauss, a former United States Secretary of Commerce and the man responsible for J. Robert Oppenheimer losing his security clearance after the Manhattan Project.

Many of Downey Jr.’s fans claimed he was “unrecognizable” in the role. As someone who has watched many of Downey’s movies and loves to see him celebrated for his talent, I wholeheartedly believe he should win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Interestingly enough, the awards campaign has led to fans learning a lot about Robert Downey Jr.’s career and how different it could have been.

During a career retrospective at the Los Angeles American Cinematheque theater, RDJ talked about how he originally met with Nolan for a role in Batman Begins. Downey’s career, at that point, was in limbo. He had done brilliant movies like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and would a few years later do Zodiac, but for the most part, studios were afraid to insure him (this almost cost him the role in the Iron Man movie).

Downey shared that he once had a meeting with Nolan about potentially playing the Scarecrow, a role that went to Cillian Murphy instead and marked the beginning of Nolan’s and Murphy’s longstanding collaboration.

“I’m pretty sure I heard about [this role] and I was like, ‘I’m Scarecrow,’” Downey Jr. said (via a transcription by Variety that they got from The Playlist podcast host Griffin Schiller). “And then I remember meeting [Nolan] for tea and I was like, ‘He doesn’t seem like he’s really in on this interview.’ And he was polite and all that. But you can tell when someone is kind of like, ‘It’s not going to go anywhere.’”

It’d be fascinating to see RDJ in more of Nolan’s work

While the role eventually gave us Cillian Murphy and Christopher Nolan working together, I do love to think about how Downey Jr. would have fit in with Nolan as a director from there on out. Nolan, famously, does not like improv on his sets. RDJ, on the other hand, loves to do it. It’s one of the reasons why I was so fascinated by his casting in Oppenheimer, possibly the only Nolan movie to feature improv (at least according to what Murphy said in a talkback I attended).

To think about Downey not being our Tony Stark but, instead, being one of Nolan’s boys is actually kind of cool. Don’t get me wrong, I love Tony and the career that RDJ got from being in the MCU, but I do think he’d thrive in Nolan’s world, too. Hopefully, Oppenheimer is just the start of his collaboration with the director and writer, and we can see more of them together in the future.

(featured image: Universal Pictures)