From a ‘Best Actor’ Golden Globe win to scooping multiple People’s Choice Awards, Robert Downey Jr.
has received many prestigious honors during his career in the movie industry.
But when it comes to discussions about Downey, there is always one film that seems to always pop up, and that’s his role in the comedy-action movie Tropic Thunder.
The 2008 film tells the story of a group of prima donna actors shooting a Vietnam war movie. But when their director dropped them in the middle of a forest, they were forced to depend only on their acting skills to survive the real danger.
Downey Jr. played Kirk Lazarus, a character that saw him transform to a person of color.
According to the Oxford dictionary, ‘blackface’ is the term used for referring to the practice of “wearing make-up to imitate the appearance of a black person. The use of such make-up was associated with minstrel shows in the United States from the 1830s until the mid 20th century; it is now regarded as highly offensive.”
But many viewers were left upset by a veteran actor using ‘pigmentation alteration’ surgery to play the character.
In a 2020 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Downey has opened up about the issue and revealed his initial feelings about his role.
“My mother was horrified. ‘Bobby, I’m telling ya, I have a bad feeling about this.’ I was like, ‘Yeah me too, mom.’”
He went on: “When Ben called and said, ‘Hey I’m doing this thing’ – you know I think Sean Penn had passed on it or something. Possibly wisely. And I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that and I’ll do that after Iron Man.’
“Then I started thinking, ‘This is a terrible idea, wait a minute.’ Then I thought, ‘Well hold on dude, get real here, where is your heart?’ My heart is… I get to be black for a summer in my mind, so there’s something in it for me,” the actor continued.
“The other thing is, I get to hold up to nature the insane self-involved hypocrisy of artists and what they think they’re allowed to do on occasion, just my opinion.”
Downey Jr. then said that “90 percent of his Black friends” enjoyed the film.
“(Ben Stiller) knew exactly what the vision for this was, he executed it, it was impossible to not have it be an offensive nightmare of a movie. And 90 percent of my black friends were like, ‘Dude, that was great,’” he added.
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