Robert Downey Jr. Changes His Tune on Iron Man Return

Robert Downey Jr. has seemingly reversed his stance on reprising the role of Iron Man within the MCU, after previously making a series of unflattering remarks concerning Marvel movies and his time working on them.

Downey has said he was “happy” to leave Marvel behind, and while accepting a BAFTA Award for his celebrated turn in Oppenheimer (for which he would later win an Oscar), Downey implied that Christopher Nolan’s biopic was “a last-ditch effort to perhaps resurrect my dwindling credibility” after 15 years of MCU installments.

During a discussion for Variety’s Actors on Actors series, Foster asked the Oppenheimer Oscar winner point blank if he would ever “think of putting the suit back on again for Tony Stark?”

Shockingly, Downey announced he was “surprisingly” game to return to the franchise even after his damning remarks in a previous Actors on Actors chat with Hulk actor Mark Ruffalo in which the two men agreed that Marvel scripts were “bulls--t.”

“It’s just crazily in my DNA. Probably the most like-me character I’ve ever played, even though he’s way cooler than I am,” Downey said of billionaire inventor Tony Stark, aka Iron Man. “I’ve become surprisingly open-minded to the idea,” he told Foster.

But even if Downey actively wanted to reprise Iron Man, some important figures at Marvel remain opposed to the idea. In April, Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo expressed doubt that Downey’s return would improve the franchise.

More notably, MCU mastermind Kevin Feige essentially closed the debate last December. “We are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again,” Feige told Vanity Fair of Downey’s emotional departure in Endgame. “We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way.”

Each of Downey’s Iron Man and Avengers pictures are streaming on Disney+.