The function performed by Robert Downey Jr.’s drug addict father to get him off the hook

Robert Downey Jr. was simply six years outdated when he took step one on his chaotic street to drug dependancy and jail.

His father had seen him sipping a glass of white wine throughout a poker evening on the household house in New York. However as an alternative of shortly taking the glass out of his younger son’s fingers, he handed him a hashish joint and instructed him to puff on it as an alternative. Such was cult filmmaker Robert Downey Sr.’s unorthodox strategy to childcare.

A lot much less well-known than his Hollywood star son – who overcame his demons to grow to be the world’s highest-paid actor – Robert Downey Sr was a reclusive director who was additionally a hopeless drug addict for a lot of his life.

Years later, he admitted he had made “a horrible, silly mistake” when he gave his six-year-old son medicine. However – as a brand new documentary, three years within the making, reveals – it was in keeping with a chaotic and irresponsible parenting model.

When he wasn’t giving his son medicine, Downey Sr. took little Robert to see X-rated motion pictures and even forged him – from the age of 5 – in his personal disturbing and much from child-friendly motion pictures. Residence life meant “rising up in a household the place everybody does medicine,” in keeping with Downey Jr.

Is it any marvel, some may ask, that the long run Iron Man star went off the rails so spectacularly?

He asks his ailing father simply that query in “Sr.”, a brand new Netflix documentary the star has made about his turbulent relationship together with his father and his weird upbringing.

The movie sheds revealing new mild on a deeply troubled however self-confident actor who instructed a decide in 1999 that, due to his father giving him medicine, he had been hooked because the age of eight. He added that his dependancy to cocaine and heroin was “like I’ve received a shotgun in my mouth, and I’ve received my finger on the set off, and I just like the style of the gunmetal”.

In July 2021, Downey Sr. died aged 85 from Parkinson’s illness. Though they present a deep affection for one another – and Downey Jr avoids direct accusations – the function his father performed in his devastating private issues is all too clear.

Referring to his bleak upbringing, Downey Jr. says at one level, “I believe we might be remiss to not focus on its impact on me.”

His father, embarrassed, murmurs again, “Boy, I might actually like to miss that dialogue.”

The youthful of two kids, Downey Jr. was born in Manhattan, New York Metropolis, in 1965 and initially grew up within the bohemian neighborhood of Greenwich Village, the place he says he was “surrounded” by medicine at house.

His mother and father had been disciples of the Nineteen Sixties counterculture and made underground movies, his mom, Elsie, appeared in no matter her husband did – as soon as enjoying all 12 feminine characters.

Though he influenced a technology of youthful filmmakers, Downey Sr’s movies had been by no means commercially profitable and the household lived hand-to-mouth in a cramped transformed loft.

His father claimed he made an X-ray-rated bonkbuster, The Candy Odor Of Intercourse, simply to pay the medical payments for the boy’s beginning.

Robert Jr was solely 5 when he had his first on-screen function. This was for an absurdist comedy, Pound (1970) – wherein the actors performed stray canines ready to be euthanized. Downey Sr. often didn’t contemplate five-year-old Robert’s age within the one line he wrote for him. “Do you’ve got hair in your balls?” the boy asks a bald man.

Two years later, a seven-year-old Downey Jr. would seem in one other of his father’s wacky motion pictures, a western referred to as Greaser’s Palace. On this, the throat was slit by a Christ-like preacher and he needed to watch as his personal mom – additionally featured within the movie – was viciously crushed.

The brand new documentary features a clip of a uncommon interview, apparently from the Nineties, wherein Downey Sr. admits: “Lots of us thought it could be hypocritical to not let our youngsters take part in marijuana and issues like that. It was an idiotic transfer by our aspect to share it with our youngsters I am simply glad he is right here.

Requested if he ever nervous that his son – who’s subsequent to him within the interview trying clearly worse for put on – won’t survive, he replies: “Many instances.”

The household moved no less than a dozen instances – to London, New Mexico, Los Angeles and Connecticut – because the mother and father pursued their careers on the expense of their kids’s training.

In LA, household pals equivalent to Jack Nicholson, Peter Sellers and Alan Arkin commonly visited a house the place hashish, says Downey Jr, “was a staple, like rice”.

In time, the director’s cult following attracted consideration from the foremost Hollywood studios – and the household moved to California so he might make a 1980 comedy referred to as Up The Academy. This depicted the outrageous antics of a bunch of misfits at a navy faculty. It was a flop, however not till Downey Sr. had tried to alter the primary characters to be ten-year-old kids. The studio instructed him he was loopy.

“Some man stated, ‘When you hold speaking like this, we will hearth you and you are not going to make closing minimize, it doesn’t matter what,'” he remembers within the documentary. “I stated, ‘OK, simply so long as I run out of cocaine.”

“And that was just about the tip of me on the market.”

His son interjects, “You were not loopy, had been you?”

Finally, Downey Jr. says, drug use turned the one method his distraught father knew join with him. “When my dad and I do medicine collectively,” he defined in a 1988 interview, “it was like he was making an attempt to specific his love for me in the one method he knew how.”

His mother and father divorced in 1978 – when Robert was 13 – and he first moved together with his father to Santa Monica, California.

In highschool, his drug and alcohol issues escalated as he partied with the Hollywood brat pack. His fellow college students there, together with Sean Penn, Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez, had been already stars, and Robert was decided to be, too.

At 16, he dropped out of college to pursue performing. At 18, he was pressured to fend for himself when his father minimize him off financially.

Downey Jr. returned to New York to strive his luck on stage. He shortly discovered not solely work but additionally romance when – after a lady with future Oscar winner Marisa Tomei – he started a severe relationship with colleague Sarah Jessica Parker, then additionally 18 and some years away from stardom in Intercourse And The Metropolis.

They lived collectively for 5 years earlier than Downey Jr’s drug dependancy destroyed their relationship.

By then, nevertheless, he had discovered his breakout function and was enjoying — what else? — a drug-addicted wealthy child within the 1987 movie Much less Than Zero.

The roles poured in, together with one with Mel Gibson within the 1990 motion comedy Air America and an Oscar-nominated efficiency as Charlie Chaplin in 1992’s Chaplin. Downey Jr. married mannequin Deborah Falconer in 1992 they usually had a son, Indio.

In the meantime, his father’s second spouse, the actress and author Laura Ernst – whom he married in 1991 – proved to be his salvation. He gave up medicine to look after her when she was identified with motor neurone illness; she died aged 36 in 1994.

“It was time to develop up, to think about another person first,” he admits.

However there was nonetheless no salvation for his son as his drug use and chaotic habits solely elevated.

His father joked – with some cheekiness within the circumstances – that he stored monitor of his son by studying the scandal-ridden Nationwide Inquirer.

There was a lot to report. In 1996, Downey Jr. was arrested for dashing whereas intoxicated and possession of heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine and an unloaded handgun. The next month, whereas awaiting trial, his neighbors referred to as the police after discovering that Downey Jr. had wandered into their house in a drugged haze and handed out on their 11-year-old son’s mattress.

That very same yr, his spouse, Deborah, lastly gave up her drug dependancy and left him. A decide ordered him to enter rehab. However he escaped, was recaptured and despatched again, and Downey Jr admitted that he was the “poster boy for pharmaceutical mismanagement”.

He repeatedly skipped court-ordered drug assessments and was out and in of jail – twice waking up in a pool of his personal blood after different inmates attacked him – earlier than a decide lastly misplaced endurance with the star’s justified conceitedness and jailed him for 3 in 1999.

Even after popping out in 2000 and profitable a Golden Globe for his function as Calista Flockhart’s boyfriend within the TV authorized drama Ally McBeal, he continued to get into bother. Police discovered cocaine and methamphetamine in his resort room and whereas on parole he was discovered strolling round LA, barefoot and excessive.

He was fired from Ally McBeal and went again to rehab. Lastly, in 2003, he met producer Susan Levin on a movie set. She instructed him she would marry him – which she did in 2005 – provided that he promised to give up medicine for good.

He went to remedy together with a 12-step program, took up meditation and kung fu and now says the strongest drug he consumes is caffeine.

His movie profession by no means appeared again. In 2008, Downey Jr. was chosen to play billionaire inventor Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, within the first of Marvel Comics’ vastly profitable Iron Man movies. The actor, who as soon as earned 8 cents an hour scrubbing boilers in jail, has earned £355 million from the franchise.

It is a gorgeous story of redemption – worthy of a Hollywood film. The query is, would any of which have occurred if Downey Sr. hadn’t given his six-year-old son that first hashish joint all these years in the past?