Robert Downey Jr.'s Weird Science of Acting

It's ninety-five degrees in Los Angeles, and Robert Downey Jr. is bobbing up and down in his manager's pool. He has just flown in from San Francisco, where he is playing a recent law-school graduate in True Believers, his fourteenth film, and he is worn out. When his girlfriend, Sarah Jessica Parker, who stars in the television show A Year in the Life, dropped him off here an hour ago, he complained about his car being broken, downed half a plate of lasagna, changed out of an outsize polka-dot shirt and black trousers into a borrowed pair of boxer shorts ("Who knows where these have been?") and jumped into the pool.

"Do you have a cigarette?" Downey is now yelling to Loree Rodkin, his manager. "Yes, Mr. Downey," she says with some amusement. "Do you want me to light it for you?" Downey nods. "How's my house going?" he says. "Will the pool look like this?" Rodkin explains that Downey has just bought a Spanish-deco house that was built for Charlie Chaplin. "Because," Downey continues, jumping up and down in the water while dragging on the cigarette, "I want it to look just like this."

Rodkin picks up the lasagna plate, which is sitting poolside, and walks back toward the house. There is no point in replying; after all, Downey is only twenty-two, and when you're rich and successful in Hollywood at twenty-two, some brattiness is expected. Besides, there is something surprisingly endearing — something positively Nicholsonian — about Downey's behavior. Unlike many actors, he is not brooding or intolerably self-absorbed. Instead, he seems to be in a semiconstant state of amusement: Downey just wants to have some fun. "Have I shown you my imitation of a fish-boy yet?" he says to Rodkin's back. "Or you can watch my fucking milky-white, white-boy figure float around."

That bratty buoyancy, what one critic called "a kind of happy-go-lucky irony," is what has made Downey's work so notable, even in distinctly unnotable films. The son of the underground filmmaker Robert Downey (Putney Swope, Greaser's Palace, among others), Robert Jr. started acting when he was still a child. He quit high school in the eleventh grade and moved to New York City. From there, his career is like a connect-the-dots painting of terrible projects. There was his one-year stint on Saturday Night Live, in 1985-86, which may have been the show's worst year ever. There were films like Weird Science (the only failure at the box office in John Hughes's teenage oeuvre), The Pick-Up Artist (Warren Beatty was originally involved, though he withdrew from the project and removed his name from the credits — which tells you something) and Less Than Zero (a depressing mess). But through it all, Downey's performances were memorable. "He shrugs and bubbles his way past every obstacle," the critic Stephen Schiff has written. "Downey is unsinkable."

Downey's upcoming projects sound a bit more promising. Within the next year he will star in Rented Lips, a film directed by his father; 1969, a coming-of-age story in which he stars opposite Kiefer Sutherland; and the aforementioned True Believers, which is being directed by Joe Ruben, who made The Stepfather. Downey will have to live with his latest mistake in career judgment, Johnny Be Good, which was released to disastrous reviews and almost complete audience lack of interest. "I'm not sure I've been in a real good movie," says Downey, still bobbing in the pool. "It'd be nice to try that. I'd like, you know, to be in one of those films where at the end you go, 'Yeah.'"