The outrageous, un-PC black comedy that blew Robert Downey Jr’s thoughts

It’s an indication of how utterly tastes have modified inside Hollywood filmmaking that it’s now inconceivable that Ben Stiller’s 2008 spoof action-comedy Tropic Thunder might be made right this moment. The 2 areas which might be probably to excite controversy are the portrayal of psychological incapacity – Stiller’s character, a fading motion star, has performed a determine known as Easy Jack, to widespread horror – and racial politics. Robert Downey Jr performs Kirk Lazarus, an intense Australian methodology actor, who has undergone ‘pigmentation alteration’ surgical procedure with a purpose to put together for his position as an African-American soldier. 

Though the majority of the modern criticism that Tropic Thunder obtained got here from incapacity rights teams, Downey Jr’s Oscar-nominated efficiency – basically getting laughs from the incongruity of his being in blackface – could be unthinkable right this moment, within the period of Black Lives Matter and its ilk. 

Downey Jr is, right this moment, certainly one of Hollywood’s most profitable and highest-paid actors, due to his roles in Marvel movies as Iron Man, however in 2008, he was nonetheless re-establishing his profession after a few years of well-documented drug issues and prison convictions, and so he was a extra candid interviewee than he’s right this moment. When discussing his influences for the character of Lazarus, he not solely talked about such Methodology actors as Russell Crowe and Daniel Day-Lewis, but additionally talked about his father, cult underground director Robert Downey Sr, and his cult satire Putney Swope. 

As Downey Jr mentioned in 2008, “I began remembering my dad did this film known as Putney Swope. I used to be in New York [at that time] and the character was presupposed to be a Vietnam soldier, so I used to be remembering among the people who have been hanging out within the West Village again then. With out it being too particular, I simply began this gravelly, cool, very world-weary voice, and I mentioned, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to have a ball with this’.” He duly did so, and mentioned, “I laid the voice on [Stiller] and he laughed, and I assumed, you recognize, he’s simply laughing to make me really feel OK, after which he’s going to vary all of it after we get there.” 

In the long run, nothing was modified, and Downey Jr’s efficiency remained a pitch-perfect homage to his father’s most profitable movie, a deeply difficult, uproariously humorous black comedy that was thought-about envelope-pushing upon its launch in 1969, and has solely grown in stature since then.