The Man Who Wasn't There

Downey tugs on the leaf-green sweater knotted around his neck and rearranges himself on the ground. His words hang in the air, atmospherically. He's got one crazy, free-floating, head-spinning way of expressing himself, and though he could say more, explain more, he doesn't. He's already moved on to some other rabbit hole and can't be brought back. That's just how his mind is. Plus he knows that we know all we need to know in order to fill in most of the blanks. It's like this. At 43, he's a witty, charming, fun-loving, mixed-metaphorically-minded, entirely off-slant kind of guy who got his start in mid-Eighties teen comedies like Weird Science and Back to School, spent a year on Saturday Night Live during its worst season ever, received his best early notices playing a doomed drug addict in Less Than Zero and then hit the Oscar-nominated big time with Chaplin, in 1992. For about 20 years, he was also a Hollywood profligate of the first water, a thoroughly doped-up Absolut-loving wastrel. And when voids loomed, whirl was king: He'd put the pedal to the metal, stopping only to get arrested while driving naked in his Porsche (1996); or to pass out in a stranger's house, in a child's bed, and wake up with medics staring at him (1996); or to spend some heel-cooling time in jail (various). About five years ago, though, he decided to clean himself up, and so far, so good. Since then, he's continued to make movies, most of them great but small (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang; Good Night, and Good Luck; Zodiac) until Iron Man hit theaters earlier this year. And Iron Man has killed. Critics loved it, audiences loved it, ticket sales have shot past the half-billion-dollar mark, and suddenly Downey is sitting pretty once again.

"Right now, my BlackBerry is literally overloading and crashing, and the phone is never not ringing," he says, hauling the damn thing out and turning it off. "It's crazy. Like a Super Bowl. Like a landslide. Like nothing I've ever experienced."

Which really is supergreat for him. His per-movie quote has gone into the multimillions. He's moving into a different, bigger, better house. He's driving a shiny black Bentley, a gift from Marvel Studios, which made Iron Man. He's been resplendent on Leno, Letterman and The View; stellar pretending to be one of Gladys Knight's Pips on American Idol (although he hated it: "dreadful, awful, depressing, and disquieting to my integrity"); and the only debonair presenter to take the stage at this year's MTV Movie Awards. All good stuff. But there is the void to think about, and this particular void may last longer than most, because he's got two more movies coming out soon, and both of them are likely to be big. In November, it's The Soloist, co-starring Jamie Foxx, a true story about a journalist (Downey) who befriends a homeless schizophrenic violinist. But first, there's the riotous, topsy-turvy movie-within-a-movie world of Tropic Thunder, in which he stars alongside Jack Black and Ben Stiller (who also directed). In this one, Downey plays a wacked-out Australian Method actor named Kirk Lazarus who tints his skin black to play an African-American soldier in a big-budget Vietnam War movie. Downey does it just right — no offense meant, no offense taken — and he pretty much steals the show. It was, however, a part he nearly turned down. He'd just finished shooting Iron Man, and Tropic Thunder was due to start filming in about two weeks. "A lot of people do big movies back to back," Stiller said, trying to convince him. "Yeah," said Downey, "but I'm not a lot of people. I've got to be careful here." Once on board, though, he apparently went all out. "We all have our demons and stuff," says Stiller, "but I've never seen anybody get lit for the acting moment as much as him. He was in a crazy zone and totally committed to his character." So committed that he occasionally stayed black even when black wasn't called for. "We'd be watching a monitor, and he just kept going on about 'I'm going to get me some barbecued ribs and chicken,' and I'm like, 'No, man, you can't do that. You gotta stop that, for real,' " says Brandon T. Jackson, one of the only black actors on the project. "But he just kept on, and then when we were doing the scene where I get pissed off at him, all that stuff just came out there, and magic happened. I don't know, but I think in his genius he was just trying to egg me on."