(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Fri 15 August 2025 19:45, UK
During the darkest days of Robert Downey Jr‘s addiction troubles, the future Iron Man star must have agonised over how he sank so low, and where his downward spiral truly began.
Of course, the man who would execute one of Hollywood’s greatest comebacks in the 2000s didn’t just wake up one day to discover he had become a drug addict. Instead, his history with illegal substances went back to his dysfunctional childhood, when his father, the independent filmmaker Robert Downey Sr, introduced him to drugs at the fucking stupid age of six.
By the time he was eight, Downey and his old man would allegedly smoke marijuana and take cocaine alongside each other as a twisted bonding exercise. “When my dad and I would do drugs together,” he once said, “It was like him trying to express his love for me in the only way he knew how.”
Naturally, this was a recipe for disaster, and by the time Downey worked his way into Hollywood in his teens and early 20s, he quickly developed a reputation as a party animal. It didn’t stop him becoming one of the industry’s hottest young stars in the late ’80s, though, with movies like Weird Science and The Pick-Up Artist showcasing his oddball charisma and undeniable screen presence.
However, in the early 2000s, as an older Downey looked back upon his life, he realised that everything changed in 1987 when he starred as college-age drug addict Julian in Less Than Zero, based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel. His “desperately moving” performance showed he had dramatic chops that arguably exceeded his comedy skills, and the movie brought Downey the best reviews of his career up to that point. On a personal level, though, the production was disastrous, and soon after the shoot ended, he checked into a rehabilitation programme for the first time. The young star would subsequently bounce in and out of similar institutions on many more occasions over the next decade.
(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
What was it about working on Less Than Zero that started Downey on such a slippery slope, though? Well, in 2003, he revealed to The Guardian that, before that film, he’d at least been able to limit his drug and alcohol consumption to evenings and weekends. “Maybe I’d turn up hungover on the set, but no more so than the stuntman,” he claimed.
However, playing a junkie character like Julian was “like the ghost of Christmas future” for Downey, as being in that headspace inadvertently increased his real-life drug intake as well. At the beginning of the shoot, he thought of the character as “an exaggeration of myself”, but he soon found life imitating art in a frightening way. He began partaking in drugs while at work, and before he knew it, the roles had reversed.
“In some ways, I became an exaggeration of the character,” he confessed with a sigh of regret. “That lasted far longer than it needed to last.”
Downey’s battle with addiction, which ramped up considerably during Less Than Zero, eventually led him to hit rock bottom. First, he was incarcerated for 12 months, and in 2001, yet another arrest led to him being fired from his Golden Globe-winning supporting role as freewheeling lawyer Larry Paul in Ally McBeal. Fascinatingly, that role is one that everyone in Hollywood seems to have fonder memories of than Downey himself.
“Funny, isn’t it?” he sarcastically noted. “For some people, that’s the litmus. Will he ever be as good again as he was on Ally McBeal? I’m probably not the best person to ask about that period. It was my lowest point in terms of addictions. At that stage, I didn’t give a fuck whether I ever acted again.”
Thankfully, Downey was finally able to get clean that same year, thanks to his marriage to Hollywood producer Susan Levin, a 12-step recovery programme, therapy, meditation, and a commitment to yoga and Wing Chun. These measures finally rid him of the spectre of addiction and ensured he could put that “ghost of Christmas future” exactly where it belonged – in his past.
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