[0:00]Before Robert Downey Jr. was a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist on the big screen, he was a troubled young man with addiction problems in real life. The critically acclaimed actor has had some painful experiences getting to where he is today. During Robert Downey Jr.'s childhood in Greenwich Village, his parents, Robert Downey Senior and Elsie Ford Downey, were underground film directors, screenwriters, and actors immersed in the area's Bohemian culture. Little Robert got to experience it all first-hand. So I got very used to falling asleep to the sound of clapboards. It's almost like I was being programmed. Unfortunately, that also included alcohol and drugs. Downey Senior gave his son his first taste of marijuana when he was just six years old. Junior told The New Breed in 1988, "There was always a lot of pot and coke around. When my dad and I would do drugs together it was like him trying to express his love for me in the only way he knew how." Over the years though, Downey Senior expressed regret over providing his young son with narcotics, but he explained things a little differently. In one interview, Downey Senior said, "A lot of us did things and thought it would be hypocritical to not have our kids participate in marijuana and stuff like that." We thought it was cute to let him smoke it and all that. It was an idiot move on our part, a lot of us to share that with our children. I'm just happy he's here. Sadly, that exposure led to the drug problems Downey Jr. faced later in life. After a few short years of making films with his mom and dad as a family, Robert Senior and Elsie divorced, shattering what little normality the young Robert Downey Jr. had in his life. While Senior and Elsie remained on good terms, the break up tore Downey away from his mother when he chose to stay by his father's side. When Downey Senior relocated to California after his divorce, Downey Jr. joined him. It was a tumultuous time for the young actor, who began to pursue acting more seriously as he got older. When he was 16, he moved back to New York to live with his mother after dropping out of high school. The time he spent with his mother back in New York helped him forge his bond with her, which became critical years later. According to Downey, it was during a low point in the mid-2000s when a heartfelt phone call from his mother Elsie moved him so deeply that he gave up alcohol for good. Although Robert Downey Jr.'s relationship with drugs began at home with his father sharing substances with him as a child, his problems got worse once he made the move to Hollywood. They exploded when he snagged his first major leading role as Julian Wells, a young man in the throws of addiction himself, in the 1987 drama Less than Zero. He recalled, "When I did 'Less than Zero,' that was right around the time I began. It was, obviously not autobiographical for me, but certainly what was similar was 'young folks, drugs, the 80s.'" The use of drugs on and around the set, ironic considering the film's cautionary tale, extended beyond just Downey himself. As he put it in his 2022 documentary Senior, "We were all altering our consciousnesses with substances. I was just kind of playing a game of just wanting to self-soothe or just stay loaded rather than deal with the fact that things had gone off the tracks a little bit." Downey's drug use spiraled out of control for the first time, as his previous bouts with alcohol and drug consumption had always been tempered. As he told The Guardian, "Until that movie, I took my drugs after work and on the weekends. That changed on 'Less Than Zero.'" In 1985, Saturday Night Live producer Lord Michaels returned to the show after five years away, and Robert Downey Jr. was one of his first new hires. The 19-year-old Downey was thrilled, as he'd been looking for work after a small role in Weird Science. There was just one problem, Downey was indisputably awful at sketch comedy, and his performances received scathing reviews. The future Marvel superhero did manage to make it through the whole season, but he was given the pink slip when it was over. Since then, his brief SNL stint has become legendary among fans, embodying everything that was wrong with the show in that era. In 2015, Rolling Stone even named him the worst cast member in the history of the long-running series. Even though it was an abject failure, Downey considered his time on SNL a learning experience. He told The Off Camera Show in 2019, "I learned so much in that year about what I wasn't. I was not somebody who was going to come up with a catchphrase, I was not somebody who was going to do impressions. I was somebody who was very ill-suited for rapid-fire sketch comedy." It did seem to have a certain, ah, certain. Nearly every actor in Hollywood has had a moment in their career where they've missed out on a major role. For Robert Downey Jr., his biggest misses were fairly early on, when he was a struggling young actor still trying to establish himself. The first was a role of Ducky in the John Hughes classic Pretty in Pink. According to star Molly Ringwald, she had wanted Downey for the role and lobbied hard for him to producers. She believed that his portrayal of the character would have matched her better with the film's original ending, which had Andy and Ducky winding up together. When Jon Cryer got the role and the film was completed though, test audiences weren't thrilled by the pairing. So the ending was rewritten to what we know today. A couple years later, Downey had a second chance to play a leading role in an 80s classic, when he was offered the part of Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything. But Downey passed on the film, and the role ultimately went to John Cusack, which ended up being a star-making performance in his young career. Like any major movie star, Robert Downey Jr. has had his share of high profile relationships. He was reportedly involved with Marissa Tomei and Calista Flockhart at different times. But one of his most public romances was with future Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker. The duo were together for seven years beginning in 1984, but their relationship was anything but harmonious. According to Parker, who was just 19 at the time they began dating, the problem stemmed from Downey's drug use and reckless behavior. In a 2023 interview, Parker revealed that she often had to play the role of guardian to her boyfriend. As she puts it, "People around him would be dismissive of me, but I had given him stability and tried to create a steady heartbeat that allowed him to show up on time. That made me angry and embarrassed." In an interview with People in 2018, she was even more candid, saying it was Downey's drug use that ended their relationship. She bluntly stated, "At a certain point, I had the courage to say, 'I'm going to walk away and I'm just going to pray that you don't die.'" Even though Robert Downey Jr. struggled with drug use and alcohol addiction all throughout his young adulthood, it wasn't until the mid-1990s that he came face-to-face with legal consequences. After years of keeping his substance abuse out of the courthouse, only receiving a stern warning after he was caught smoking pot at Disneyland, his struggles spilled into public view when he found himself arrested in June 1996. Downey was coming off of his starring role in 1995's Restoration, and he was caught driving under the influence. The story made headlines in Hollywood, as reports at the time revealed, Downey was stopped for speeding after sheriff's deputies spotted him driving erratically. After a search of his pickup truck revealed several illegal substances, the 30-year-old actor was also booked for drug possession and weapons charges related to an unloaded handgun also found in the vehicle. Downey was freed on bail, but he was sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to undergo periodic drug testing. A year later, he didn't make one of those court-appointed check-ins and found himself serving four months behind bars in county jail as a result. In the late 1990s, Robert Downey Jr. was a living cautionary tale of how far a star could fall. In 1999, after he missed yet another court-ordered drug test, Downey had the book thrown at him. He received a sentence of three years in prison, and although he was released after just 15 months, the actor has often looked back at that time as the worst in his life. He told Dax Shepard on the Armchair Expert podcast, "Arguably the most dangerous place I've ever been in my life. You could just feel the evil in the air. It was kind of like just being in a really bad neighborhood, and there was no opportunity there; there was only threats." When I was, you know, locked down in a, uh, California correctional facility, I said, 'Wow, this is really not panning out for me.' Downey likens the experience to being on an alien planet with no way back to Earth, but it didn't mean that he was completely scared straight. Just months after his release in 2000, Downey was arrested on Thanksgiving weekend for drug possession and being under the influence of narcotics. In 2015, having been clean and sober for over a decade, California governor Jerry Brown gave Downey an unconditional pardon for his past offenses. Though his record wasn't expunged entirely, the pardon means he once again has the right to vote, something felons didn't have in California until Proposition 17 was approved in 2020. In the early 2000s, Robert Downey Jr.'s career was in shambles after various scandals and more than a year in prison. Some in the industry may have wondered if he could recover from the non-stop controversy, rehab stints and arrests, even if there was never any doubt about his immense talent. But in 2000, one of TV's biggest legal dramas, Ally McBeal, decided to roll the dice on Downey. The results were spectacular, at least at first, with Downey reinvigorating the series as the title character's musically talented new boyfriend, Larry Paul. It finally looked like Downey was going to be the big comeback story of the new millennium. And he was even nominated for an Emmy Award and won a Golden Globe for his performance. Once again though, Downey couldn't stay out of trouble, as he was hit with another pair of arrests on drug related charges. Ally McBeal creator David E Kelly wasted little time in dropping Downey from the series, cratering Downey's initial career comeback just as it was getting started. Robert Downey Jr. has rarely held back about his difficult childhood and the problems he faced as the son of two filmmakers who had struggles with drugs and alcohol themselves. That made things challenging for the actor, as the years passed and he faced his demons, but it was still incredibly difficult for Downey when his mother Elsie died in 2014. In reaction to her death, Downey published a moving statement about his mother's life. He talked about how Elsie had been more than just a mother, but an inspiration in cleaning himself up. It could have also been losing his mother that made him take stock of his difficult relationship with his father, Robert Downey Senior. In 2019, the younger Downey embarked on a journey to document his dad's life in what became the 2022 documentary Senior. Released on Netflix just months after Downey Senior's death, the film sees the actor getting closer to his aging father, who was suffering the effects of Parkinson's disease. But the film went beyond being a simple tribute to his dad. It also ended up being a poignant story of love and loss, coupled with the lessons learned when coming to terms with death. It couldn't have been easy for Robert Downey Senior to watch his son go through years of substance abuse, knowing it played a part in his addictions. Sadly, Robert Downey Jr. also had to play the role of father to a troubled son when his own child went through similar struggles. The son of Downey Jr. and his first wife Deborah Falconer, Indio Falconer Downey is a promising musician these days. But he got into legal trouble due to drug use in 2014. That year, Indio was arrested in Los Angeles for drug possession, which some may have feared would lead to the same kind of self-destructive behavior his father displayed for decades. Thankfully, Indio had plenty of help in the form of his famous father.
[11:24]As Deborah Falconer revealed to Radar Online, she said in 2019, "Robert has stood by our son all the way through the 'highs and lows' and he's in a great place just now." While Indio has continued to face challenges, it was reported in late 2023 that he had reached a milestone of 18 months of sobriety, and he was preparing to release his first EP in early 2024. Indio told people, "I feel I'm going through a transformation." While Robert Downey Jr.'s first attempt at a comeback stalled after he was booted from Ally McBeal, his next resurgence as the first face of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was a little more successful, to say the least. But after a little more than a decade in the role of Tony Stark, Downey stepped away from superheroes. Unfortunately, his post-MCU career hasn't been all that he might have hoped. Downey's first film after Avengers Endgame was Dolittle, a reimagining of the classic tale about a man who can communicate with animals. It was a bomb thanks to its massive budget, and it was savaged by critics. It ended up being another three years before Downey returned to theaters. His own production company released several new projects in the meantime, but they proved to be hit or miss. He executive produced a new Perry Mason series from HBO that was well reviewed, but ended up canceled after just two seasons. Downey found his first major success after Iron Man by stepping into the role of Lewis Strauss in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer in 2023, a performance for which he received massive critical acclaim. Amateurs seek the sun, get eaten. Power stays in the shadows. If you or anyone you know is struggling with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
