How Robert Downey Jr. Really Feels About Jimmy Kimmel's Harsh Oscars 2024 Joke
It's been just about a month since Jimmy Kimmel hosted the Academy Awards ... and apparently, there's no bad blood between the late-night host and one of the evening's big winners.
During his opening monologue, Kimmel went after best supporting actor nominee Robert Downey Jr. — who went on to win that award later in the night — and poked fun at the former Iron Man's "higher points," referencing Downey's previous struggles with addiction. In the moment, Downey seemed (understandably) frustrated with Kimmel, making a gesture for the comedian to wrap it up and move on to another subject before tapping his nose. "Was that too on the nose or is that a drug motion you made?" Kimmel asked Downey from the stage, at which point the actor's "Oppenheimer" co-star (and nominee for best supporting actress) Emily Blunt placed her hands on Downey's shoulders in an apparently comforting gesture.
With that said, Downey revealed in a recent profile with GQ that he doesn't really care very much about Kimmel's jabs. Since part of the interview was conducted shortly after the Oscars, interviewer Ryan D'Agostino asked the Academy Award winner about Kimmel's jokes. "I don't care," Downey admitted. "I love Jimmy Kimmel. I think he's a national treasure."
Robert Downey Jr. had a rough road to success — now he's officially on Hollywood's A-list
It's no secret that the early years of Robert Downey Jr.'s career were marked by him grappling with addiction; his performance in "Less Than Zero," where he plays a young man addicted to drugs, is particularly poignant when you consider the actor's real-life troubles. Downey went to rehab and jail multiple times throughout his addictions to substances like cocaine and heroin, and he has, by his own admission, been sober since 2003. However, after his very public problems, it was, apparently, tough for the actor to consistently book roles. "Iron Man" wasn't the first role Downey booked after getting sober, but it was the one that put him back on the map and helped him ascend to Hollywood's A-list once and for all.
Not only that, but according to his friends and colleagues, the Marvel star is always there to help others struggling with addiction. Gwyneth Paltrow spoke to GQ for the same profile and revealed that she had a friend who was suffering and needed help, and Downey immediately agreed to lend a hand. "I think he's created an abundance of all the wonderful stuff in life, and he creates abundance for other people, too," Paltrow said. "It's like the healthy side of addiction. When abundance is in its healthy form, I think this is what it looks like."
A major role in Oppenheimer helped Robert Downey Jr. take home his first Oscar
After spending just over a decade in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Tony Stark, Robert Downey Jr. hung up Iron Man's suit and eventually joined the project that would make him an Oscar winner: Christopher Nolan's historical epic "Oppenheimer." Downey plays somewhat against type in the film as the power-hungry Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss, a retired Navy officer and high-ranking member of the US Atomic Energy Commission ... who happens to harbor a serious vendetta against physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (fellow Oscar winner Cillian Murphy). It's due to Strauss' machinations and manipulations behind the scenes that Oppenheimer faces serious questioning over his ties to the Communist party and is, at least for some time, largely discredited in political circles — and this reveal is a masterpiece of acting from Downey.
"I knew that playing Strauss, in 'Oppenheimer,' was going to be like picking fly sh** out of pepper—that it was going to be extremely exacting, that it was going to be . . . not confining, but liberating by its varied implicit limitations of what my usual toolbox is," Downey told GQ. Clearly, going beyond his "usual toolbox" worked out. Downey beat out a crowded field that included Ryan Gosling (for his fully committed turn as Ken in "Barbie"), Mark Ruffalo (going for broke as a seedy, sex-crazed lawyer in "Poor Things"), Robert de Niro (as a truly evil man behind the murders of Native Americans in "Killers of the Flower Moon"), and Sterling K. Brown (for the aloof but caring brother to Jeffrey Wright in "American Fiction").
"Oppenheimer" is streaming on Peacock now.