The role Robert Downey Jr’s drug-addict father played in sending him off the rails

Robert Downey Jr was just six years old when he took the first step on his chaotic path to drug addiction and prison.

His father had seen him drinking a glass of white wine during a poker night at the family home in New York. But instead of quickly removing the glass from his little boy’s hands, he handed her a cannabis joint and told her to smoke it. Such was cult filmmaker Robert Downey Sr.’s unorthodox approach to childcare.

Far less well known than his Hollywood star son, who overcame his demons to become the world’s highest-paid actor, Robert Downey Sr. was a maverick director who was also a hopeless drug addict for much of his life.

Years later, he admitted he had made “a terrible, stupid mistake” by giving his six-year-old son drugs. However, as she reveals a new documentary, three years in the making, she was in tune with a chaotic and irresponsible parenting style.

When he wasn’t giving his son narcotics, Downey Sr. would take little Robert to see X-rated movies and even featured him, from the age of five, in his own disturbing, unsuitable for kids movies. Home life involved “growing up in a family where everyone used drugs,” according to Downey Jr.

Is it any wonder, some may wonder, that the future Iron Man star went off the rails so spectacularly?

She asks her ailing father that very question in ‘Mr.,’ a new Netflix documentary the star has made about her turbulent relationship with her father and her strange upbringing.

The film sheds a revealing new light on a deeply troubled but self-assured actor who, in 1999, told a judge that, thanks to his father giving him drugs, he had been hooked since he was eight years old. He added that his addiction to cocaine and heroin was “like I have a shotgun in my mouth, and my finger is on the trigger, and I like the taste of gun metal.”

In July 2021, Downey Sr died at the age of 85 from Parkinson’s disease. Though they show deep affection for each other, and Downey Jr. avoids recriminations, the role his father played in his devastating personal problems is all too clear.

Referring to his lousy upbringing, Downey Jr says at one point, “I think I’d be remiss not to discuss its effect on me.”

His father, embarrassed, mutters, “Wow, I’d love to miss that discussion.”

Downey Jr., the younger of two children, was born in Manhattan, New York, in 1965 and initially grew up in the bohemian neighborhood of Greenwich Village, where he says he was “surrounded” by drugs at home.

His parents were 1960s counterculture disciples and made underground movies, his mother, Elsie, was in everything her husband did, once playing all 12 female characters.

Although he influenced a younger generation of filmmakers, Downey Sr’s films were never commercially successful and the family lived hand-to-hand in a small converted loft.

His father claimed that he made an X-rated hit, The Sweet Smell Of Sex, just to pay for the medical bills for the child’s birth.

Robert Jr was only five years old when he had his first on-screen role. This was for a farcical comedy, Pound (1970), in which the cast played stray dogs waiting to be put down. Downey Sr. generally ignored Robert’s five-year-old age in the one line he wrote to him. Do you have hair on your balls? the boy asks a bald man.

Two years later, a seven-year-old Downey Jr. would appear in another of his father’s deranged movies, a western called Greaser’s Palace. In this, he had his throat slit by a Christ-like preacher and had to watch his own mother, who also appears in the film, brutally beaten.

The new documentary includes a clip from a rare interview, apparently from the 1990s, in which Downey Sr admits, “A lot of us think it would be hypocritical for our kids not to be into marijuana and things like that.” It was a idiotic move on our part to share that with our children. I’m happy you’re here.

Asked if he ever worried that his son, who is next to him in the interview and looking clearly worse off, might not survive, he replies: “Lots of times.”

The family moved at least a dozen times, to London, New Mexico, Los Angeles and Connecticut, as the parents pursued their careers at the expense of their children’s education.

In Los Angeles, family friends like Jack Nicholson, Peter Sellers and Alan Arkin regularly visited a house where cannabis, Downey Jr says, “was a staple, like rice.”

Over time, the director’s cult following garnered the attention of major Hollywood studios, and the family moved to California so he could make a 1980s comedy called Up The Academy. This depicted the outrageous antics of a group of misfits at a military college. It was a flop, but not before Downey Sr. tried to change the main characters to be ten-year-olds. The studio told him he was crazy.

“One guy said, ‘If you keep talking like that, we’re going to fire you and you’re not going to get the final cut, no matter what,'” he recalls in the documentary. “I said, ‘Okay, as long as I get the final cut with the cocaine.’

“And that was pretty much the end of me out there.”

His son chimes in: ‘You didn’t give a damn, did you?’

Eventually, Downey Jr. says, drug use became the only way his befuddled father knew how to connect with him. “When my dad and I were doing drugs together,” he explained in a 1988 interview, “it was like he was trying to express his love for me in the only way he knew how.”

His parents divorced in 1978, when Robert was 13 years old, and he initially moved with his father to Santa Monica, California.

In high school, his drug and alcohol problems escalated while he was out partying with the Hollywood brat group. His fellow students there, including Sean Penn, Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez, were already stars and Robert was determined to be too.

At 16, he dropped out of school to pursue acting. At 18, he was forced to fend for himself when his father cut him off financially.

Downey Jr returned to New York to try his luck on stage. He quickly found not only work but also romance when, after an affair with future Oscar winner Marisa Tomei, he began a serious relationship with co-star Sarah Jessica Parker, then also 18, and some years after stardom in Sex. And The City.

They lived together for five years before Downey Jr.’s drug addiction destroyed their relationship.

By then, however, she had found her breakout role, playing what else? – a rich kid addicted to drugs in the 1987 film Less Than Zero.

Roles flooded in, including one co-starring with Mel Gibson in the 1990 action comedy Air America, and an Oscar-nominated performance as Charlie Chaplin in 1992’s Chaplin. Downey Jr. married model Deborah Falconer in 1992 and they had a son. , Indian.

Meanwhile, his father’s second wife, actress and writer Laura Ernst, whom he married in 1991, turned out to be his salvation. He gave up drugs to care for her when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease; she died at age 36 in 1994.

“It was time to grow up, to think of someone else first,” he admits.

But there was still no salvation for his son, as his drug use and chaotic behavior only increased.

His father joked, somewhat cheekily under the circumstances, that he tracked down his son by reading the scandal-ridden National Inquirer.

There was a lot to report. In 1996, Downey Jr was arrested for speeding while intoxicated and for possession of heroin, cocaine, crack and an unloaded gun. The following month, while awaiting trial, his neighbors called the police after discovering that Downey Jr. had entered his home in a haze of drugs and passed out on his 11-year-old son’s bed. years.

The same year, his wife, Deborah, finally gave up her drug addiction and left him. A judge ordered him to enter rehab. But he escaped, was recaptured and sent back, with Downey Jr admitting that he was “the poster boy for pharmaceutical mismanagement.”

He repeatedly skipped court-ordered drug tests and was in and out of jail, twice waking up in a pool of his own blood after other inmates attacked him, before a judge finally lost patience with the arrogance. of the star and imprisoned him for three years in 1999.

Even after dating in 2000 and winning a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Calista Flockhart’s boyfriend on the TV legal drama Ally McBeal, he kept getting into trouble. Police found cocaine and methamphetamine in his hotel room, and while he was out on probation, they found him wandering around Los Angeles, barefoot and high.

Fired from Ally McBeal, he went back to rehab. Finally, in 2003, he met producer Susan Levin on a film set. She told him that she would marry him, which she did in 2005, only if she promised to give up drugs forever.

He entered therapy that included a 12-step program, took up meditation and kung fu, and now says the strongest drug he takes is caffeine.

His movie career never looked back. In 2008, Downey Jr was cast to play billionaire inventor Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, in the first of Marvel Comics’ blockbuster Iron Man movies. The actor, who once earned 8p an hour scrubbing pans in jail, made £355m from the franchise.

It’s an amazing story of redemption, worthy of a Hollywood movie. The question is, would any of this have happened if Downey Sr hadn’t given his six-year-old son that first cannabis joint all those years ago?