Where were Winnifred and Willow? Last night he came downstairs around bedtime and didn’t see either of them. This alarmed him. He wasn’t worried about Monty—Monty’s an old cat, shows up when he pleases. But the two rescue kittens aren’t as worldly as Monty is, and there are hawks here in Malibu, which is why last year Robert Downey Jr. hired the host of the television show My Cat from Hell to come and rig up all kinds of gates, tents, fences, and special cat doors, everything wrapped in camouflage netting—what Downey calls Catification Zones. Because Downey knows that if he lets anything happen to the cats, Susan and the kids will vote him out on the street.
It had been a normal Friday evening, full of the smallness of life that sustains Downey these days. His son Exton plays in the sixth-seventh-eighth-grade basketball league and they’d all gone to his game at the high school, after which Exton went to a sleepover. The house was quiet now—the chef had gone home; the alpacas (Dandy, Fuzzy, Sadie, Jess, and Buttercup), the goats (Cutieboots, Memo, Zoltar, and Pepper—the only one Downey’s kids let him name), and the other animals were asleep outside; and Downey was maybe going to find something new to watch on his iPad Pro now that he’d finished The Curse.
But where were Winnie and Willow? He called to his nine-year-old daughter, Avri, in her room, and it turned out that the kittens had crawled up inside her bed frame, either trapped or hiding, and she couldn’t lure them out. There’s no bottom under the frame—it’s like a futon—plus Avri has about a hundred blankets on her bed (“like chain mail,” Downey says), so they were both peeling off the covers while he was trying to lift the mattress and reach under and then blam! one of the cats came flying out, scared the crap out of him, and the other one went that way and—
It was a whole thing.
He’s telling me this over a cup of coffee the next morning. Why is he telling me this? I don’t know, but it’s funny. I then knock over my coffee—this is one minute into our interview—and look frantically for something with which to wipe the umber splotch off his white kitchen table. But he says, “No, don’t touch it!” He splays his hands in the air, staring at the spill as if he were framing a shot. “It’s perfect.”
I look at the spill and—well, it is . . . kind of . . . perfect.
By pretending that my klutz move was an act of inadvertent artistic creation, Downey has, in this moment, saved me from humiliation. I didn’t know it then, but it was clear when I listened to the tape later that from that moment on, for the next five hours, this interview would be different. He would lead, and I would follow, and it would hardly clock as an interview at all but rather a sort of conversation. In fact, it would be unlike any conversation I had ever had in my life.
Last I checked, it was Saturday,” he says of today. Four days ago, Downey, fifty-nine, was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in Oppenheimer, and telling himself this is just a regular Saturday is his way of keeping life small. “It’s so funny, too, because you either constantly remind yourself when things aren’t going your way, or you’re constantly reminded externally when things are going your way,” he says, unwrapping a nugget of Nicorette. “Clearly, the latter is preferable.” He smiles, the bright, boyish smile—rubbery lips and eyes like a sad clown’s and not a care on God’s green earth—that has broken your heart or made you laugh in a thousand scenes.
He sits at the round white table in the bright, white kitchen, dressed in baggy camo. Behind him is the coffee station: a Moccamaster, an elaborate espresso machine, and a jumble of eco-friendly plastic cubes that say happy, his new coffee company. I’ve brought him honey I bought at a farm stand up the road. He thanks me very much and studies the label, then informs me that what I assumed was local honey is actually from Delano, California, a small city near Bakersfield full of enormous processing plants. Awesome. He smiles and saves me from embarrassment again: “Well, think locally, buy regionally!”
I’m barely asking questions, because when Downey talks you want to listen. His mind is always operating on several levels, and you want to find out where he’s going, so you don’t step on his thoughts. He then fills the short lulls with kaleidoscopic soliloquies that skitter from thought to idea to memory and I’m hypnotized. Like:
Me: What do you want to do that you haven’t done?
Downey: Everything I haven’t done. It’s natural to bolster one’s delicate ego by imagining that everything’s been said, done, and experienced. And/or I love a bit of contempt prior to investigation. But I think that’s really what I’ve bumped up against in the last—let’s call it thousand days. Said, ‘Oh, it’s not even just contrary action,’ and see what happens. It’s more like I notice folks, myself included, tend to hold ourselves in bondage based on our self-limiting beliefs. So then I go, Okay, well obviously I don’t have self-limiting beliefs in the area of you-name-it where it’s pretty clear that you’re creating a reality according to some pretty good expectations or with some confidence or with knowing how you get there—the steps. And then there’s—I love this phrase—You want problems in areas where you didn’t used to have areas . . .
He goes on. I nod and try to keep up, each sentence a kind of charged particle. For many years in the eighties and nineties, Downey did everything big. He led a big Hollywood life, had an enormous drug problem, and made tons of movies. He hadn’t had much of a childhood—his father, known as Senior in the family, directed avant-garde films. His parents separated when he was twelve, and his father moved to Los Angeles with Downey’s sister while he stayed in New York with his mother. There wasn’t a lot of what he calls the small stuff at all, and he ached for a normal family life.
Once, when he was around thirty, still up and down with his addiction, he stopped by to see his friend Mel Gibson, with whom he had starred in Air America in 1990. “I was in some shabby little room with all my children,” Gibson says. “I had this tribe of kids, and they were all kind of youngish, and they were lying all over me, watching some crappy movie on TV and laughing. And Robert came in and sat and watched the TV, but I think he was watching us. When he got up to leave, I went out with him and he said, ‘Man, how do you do that? You’re like a saint.’ He looked at that in some kind of wonder. I think he really wanted that sense of family.”
Downey and his wife, Susan, a producer, have been married for eighteen years and have two children together, Exton and Avri. During the pandemic, they took regular walks on the beach below their home for what he calls walking couples therapy: “Trying to figure out where we’re at, what’s pissing us off, what are we afraid of, what do we want, what will bring us closer together, how do we measure ourselves against relationships that we define as exemplary and not be repeaters or over-emulate? How do we want to shape our life?”
When Downey’s not off shooting a movie for weeks at a time and Susan’s not mired in postproduction, weekdays go something like this: The two walk Exton and Avri to a cabin near the main house where the kids are home schooled by a teacher. They then go to their offices (on the premises), then try to meet up for lunch, which is sometimes a working lunch to discuss a project for Team Downey, their production company. They check in with the kids after school. It seems a happy home. Small (though quite large).
I ask Downey what he likes to read. “Well, let’s see,” he says, grabbing another Nicorette and a stack of books from a kitchen shelf.
“We’ve got the Rick Rubin,” he says. (The music producer’s recent book, The Creative Act, is on top.)
“We got a little twelve-step action.” (A book about recovery.)
“I’m still diving into Strauss’s book, Men and Decisions.” (This, a dense book by former Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss, the man he plays in Oppenheimer, was published in 1962. Downey’s edition is old, in excellent condition, and signed by Strauss.)
“That’s the one we just did.” (Cool Food, by Downey and climate writer Thomas Kostigen, a manifesto about climate-friendly foods, with recipes.)
“Oh, looga this.” He grabs The Book of Symbols, a guide to the meanings of visual symbols throughout time, and he starts leafing to the pages he’s dog-eared. “It just shows . . . everything: the Crescent. Rain. The Pine Tree. I don’t know why, but I love this stuff. I think you get so much energy and data. Shipwreck. Oh my God—Thread! Helmet, for sure.” (Because Iron Man.)
The Apron page is flagged. His brow crinkles.
“Why did I go to Apron? Oh: ‘The apron of the body, the abdomen and pelvic area that contains the organs of generation, lends its shape and potency to the apron of costume.’ That’s why. Oh: ‘Cooks, bakers, artisans. Artisans wear aprons to protect them from the material of their work, but such aprons also carry that evocation of a chthonic generative fire.’ C-h-t-o . . . thonic? Chthonic. Is that an e or—? Motherfucker.”
He speaks into his phone now, seeking help: “C-h-t-h-o-n-i-c. Ch-thonic. C-h-t-h-o-n-i . . . By the way”—he is trying to look up the definition on his phone, which can’t find the word—“I mean, come on.” Finally, his phone says, “Thonic.” “ ‘Concerning, belonging to, or inhabiting’ ”—he looks up at me like a surprised Goonie—“ ‘the underworld! A chthonic deity.’ Dude. This is a big moment for us.” He snaps the book closed and is off again, unspooling thoughts with only lame promptings from me. (“Really?” “Your father?” “Wow.”) About The Sympathizer, his upcoming series; about Downey’s Dream Cars, his recent eco-mod car-reno show; about filming Sr., the 2022 documentary on his father. This is one of his great and many gifts, this ability to move immense volumes of words from his brain to his lips at high speed and have them emerge in a long ribbon of enchanting stories and real-time analysis that you don’t hear so much as . . . watch.
