Robert Downey Jr. enters the press room and swiftly sits down and throws his feet up on the table, revealing his bright green, slick sneakers. It’s a laugh, and he drops his feet from the table shortly afterwards. Such is the relaxed nature of Downey Jr. and a refreshing one at that.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m crazy about these new sneakers,” he says. He moves to say that in Thailand that would be like saying ‘fuck you’ and says “so just understand, it’s nothing personal. Pointing the bottom of your foot to someone, let me not do that.”
“Iron Man 2” footage has just included the trailer as well as a clip on ‘Whiplash’ played by Mickey Rourke who’s seen lashing away two vicious looking whips whilst Tony Stark lies wounded on the ground. Surely, a character not to be trifled with. Unfortunately, Mickey Rourke didn’t join the group at Comic-Con, but hey, you can’t have it all.
Someone asks if we’re going to see Iron Man and War Machine go head-to-head and he responds “Well, I got that sense from the footage” he says cheekily. “But it could be a misdirect, couldn’t it?” He continues “If I had to piece together what’s going on in that footage, I would say that at a certain point, probably in act 1 or 2, Tony is approached by Nick Fury who’s wondering what it’s like for him not to have any backup and ‘Rhodey’ slash Cheedle’s thing has always been ‘hey come try to work with us’ we see that he’s under pressure from the senate to essentially turn over the weapon that he designed when he was under contract with them but the truth is he didn’t design it for government contract, he designed it to save his own life. So he has an argument there.“ He moves on to talk about Tony Stark “What we took the risk of exploring is that Tony goes on a much more perilous journey this time than he did when all he had to do was save his own ass.”
He speaks about Don Cheadle coming in as the new Colonel James ‘Rhodey’ Jones, replacing Terrence Howard from the first film as well as new cast members Scarlett Johansson, Mickey Rourke, Samuel L. Jackson and Sam Rockwell and says “Everybody knows Don, everybody’s seen the incredible work he’s been doing over the years and I just have this problem where I tend to go up to people if they’ve come to join a project partially due to the fact that they figured that part of what may have worked last time was my direct involvement. I feel really beholden to say to them ‘I guarantee you and I promise you we will work our asses off to really pay this character off to give you what you would expect for coming to join us. I guess the challenge this time was that I was saying it to three or four new people. Jon and I were telling Mickey we wouldn’t just let him play a two-dimensional nemesis.
We were thrilled to get Scarlett and we said ‘you’re not just going to be you a Marvel spin-off story thing’…we want a hot chick kicking ass in this movie and I think we managed that. And with Sam, he’s just such a gifted guy that to come in obviously it’s no secret now that he’s essentially filling the space that Tony’s evacuated now that he says he’s not going to make weapons anymore. So what is it like to be quote and quote a wannabe Tony Stark and what how does that add up to what his conflict is and all that stuff. But the real one was with Don of saying the no man is an island thing. I always got from the comic books that if Tony and Rhodey were hanging out it would be a toss-up which one of them would get laid first.”
He talks about working with Don Cheadle and says “He’s someone who I feel we have a real repartee and ease and he’s not intimidated by me really in any way so I wanted to bring that to the screen as much as possible while still having him have his own part and all that.”
He talks more about “Iron Man” and the franchise:
“I tend to think of it as this really kind of unspoiled arena of activity in a very heartless, wonderful, treacherous industry.”
When asked about what looks to be Stark’s ailing health in “Iron Man 2” due to the footage showing an infection of sorts spiraling across his chest, he responds cheekily again “You may be onto something.”
Since the first film introduced the characters, he’s asked how this film can liberate him and what can he and Jon do with this movie that they couldn’t do with the first film?
“Well, I’ll end with this – it’s six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. Usually the origin story is the most interesting story because you get to see someone becoming who we love them once they are. Again, we just upped the stakes. He has to be dealing with things that are more pertinent than his immediate survival and he has to be exposed to things that are beyond the realm of easy understanding even for someone as bright as he is. And those were all there so we didn’t have to reach or create anything. It’s kind of…you can’t tell a story any better than it really happened. We just started looking back in the stories and then kind of did an amalgam of those and we didn’t take ourselves seriously at all, but we took the storytelling really, really, really seriously.”
“Iron Man 2” is set to knock the socks off audiences when it unspools on May 7th next year. Keep an eye out for upcoming interviews with Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow), Don Cheadle (‘Rhodey’), Sam Rockwell (Justin Hammer), director Jon Favreau and producer Kevin Feige.
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