‘I am not my work’
   Date :17-Jul-2019

 
For over a decade, Robert Downey Jr has been Tony Stark aka Iron-Man for Marvel fanatics around the world but the actor is clear, in real life, he is not the beloved superhero. The actor, whose career stemmed from theatre, said his off-Broadway training taught him to maintain “aesthetic distance” from the characters he plays in order to remain in touch with his identity. “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 (Iron-Man). “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’,” Downey Jr told The Hollywood Reporter.
 
But both Disney’s Marvel Studio and the actor benefited from the mirror-like personas of Hollywood star and Iron-Man. “Initially, by creating and associating and synergising 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,” he said. The 54-year-old actor earned USD 50 million as backend profit participation for Avengers (2012), and he made USD 75 million for Avengers: Infinity War. Calling himself Marvel’s “trust fund kid”, Downey Jr noted post Avengers: Endgame an unknown road waits for him.
 
“There’s always a dependency on something that feels like a sure thing. It’s closest I will ever come to being a trust fund kid,” he said of his time with the studio. Fans are yet to move on from Robert Downey Jr’s departure as IronMan/Tony Stark, but the Hollywood star is already looking forward to the next phase of his life. “I have not been forced to explore the new frontier of what is my creative and personal life after this. 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,” Downey Jr said in an interview with “Off Camera with Sam Jones”. From one beloved character, the 54-year-old actor is moving on to two iconic parts--he will play Dr Dolittle in The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle and reprise his role as Sherlock Holmes in the third installment of the franchise.