ROBERT DOWNEY JR. The star of “Iron Man”

By DAVID CARR

LOS ANGELES - Look at him standing there, a great big movie star in a great big movie, the Iron Man without a trace of human frailty. A scant five years ago the only time you saw Robert Downey Jr. getting big coverage in the news media was when he was in trouble with the law.
Yet when it came time for Marvel Studios to cast the lead for a huge franchise film, “Iron Man,” it bet on Mr. Downey, and the resurgent actor rose to the challenge.
For years Mr. Downey has been tagged with two shorthand references: “The greatest actor of his generation” (for his Oscar-nominated role in “Chaplin”) was usually quickly followed by “drug-addled lowlife” (based on multiple arrests for drug possession).
Mr. Downey earns both of those tags, but there is no mistaking that he has the ambition to be the former. He has appeared in “Natural Born Killers,” “Less Than Zero” and “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” among some 50 other films.
Now sober, highly productive (he’ll be in Ben Stiller’s “Tropic Thunder” this summer and has just finished filming “The Soloist,” about a homeless schizophrenic) and very much engaged as he sits in his home in Brentwood, Mr. Downey seems less surprised than the rest of us.
“The people who made this movie said they were going to screen-test some people, and I thought: ‘Well, that’s how I got “Chaplin.” Maybe this will work again,’ ” he said. “If you’re going to spend a hundred million bucks on a movie, why not see who works?”
It doesn’t take much more than a viewing of the “Iron Man” trailer to sense that Mr. Downey walked on the set and said, “Yeah, I got this.” And there is a sincere logic behind his casting in this estimated $130 million movie, scheduled to open between April 30 and May 3 worldwide.
The story of Tony Stark, a geniusinventor- billionaire-arms dealer, is plenty textured: he likes big weapons and fast women and seems to have misplaced his conscience, so it makes sense that the man who steps into both his suit of armor and his role as superhero has grappled with vice. After a life of squandered promise spreading mayhem everywhere, our hero has a near-death experience and finds within himself the angel of his better nature.
Sound familiar?
“I’m not the superhero type,” the Stark character explains. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes, some of them publicly.” The parallels between Mr. Downey and his character on screen run throughout the film.
“There are things we know about just from reading the newspaper,” said Jeff Bridges, who plays a surprisingly affable villain to Mr. Downey’s superhero. “He doesn’t have to do anything to make it happen. The audience brings that darker part of the story into the theater. And his wit and improvisation bring it home.”
Jon Favreau, the writer of “Swingers” and the director of “Elf” and now “Iron Man,” said that casting Mr. Downey was not a source of stress.
“Nobody went to see a movie about the pirate ride at Disneyland,” Mr. Favreau said by phone. “They got interested in it because of Johnny Depp. When Robert was cast in ‘Iron Man,’ it was as if a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. He was not the obvious choice, but my larger fear was making a mediocre movie; the landscape of the superhero is very picked over. I knew that Robert’s performance would elevate the movie.”
When serious actors take on jobs involving comic books and hours in machines and makeup, they generally suffer through it for the paycheck. Mr. Downey is having none of that. At 43 he is thrilled to be fit enough - he had spent the morning receiving instruction in wing chun, a Chinese martial art built on aggressive, close combat - to play a hero. He views the Big Comic Book Movie as a kind of arrival after years of lead roles in movies like “The Singing Detective” and “The Gingerbread Man,” which had cinematic pedigrees but little in the way of audiences.
“I’ve been in big movies before and never had a problem with them,” he said. “What is creepy and obvious is that the market was suddenly flooded with morons who thought, ‘If I’ve got $500,000, I can make a baseball cap that has a company name on it and say I’m a filmmaker.’ ”
“On the contrary,” he added, “I am thrilled to have made this movie with Jon. I seem to have been the person who’s had to wait the longest for this kind of gratification.
“It took a while. Richard Attenborough,” he said, referring to the director of “Chaplin,” “told me that one day your ambition will supersede all of these other impulses you have, and that will help set you straight.”
Today Mr. Downey appears to be happily married, to the producer Susan Levin, and to have a good relationship with his teenage son from a previous marriage, Indio, who stopped by at the end of the interview.
Mr. Downey said he has left his self-destructive past behind him and moved on with his life.
“I’m not in that sphere of activity anymore,” he said, “and I don’t understand it any more than I understood 10 or 20 years ago that somehow everything was going to turn out O.K. from this lousy, exotic and dark triple chapter of my life. I swear to God I don’t even really understand that planet anymore.”