Robert Downey Jr.’s return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, announced Saturday at San Diego Comic-Con, would have been a surprise anyway. But the fact that he’s returning not to play Iron Man, the founder of the Avengers, but instead to play Doctor Doom, the arch-nemesis of the Fantastic Four, is almost baffling.
One question has been particularly loud following the news: How can Downey Jr. play Doom when everyone in the MCU is already familiar with his face as Tony Stark? Sure, Marvel Comics has Tony Stark becomes Doctor DoomAnd Victor von Doom has become Iron Man. It’s a 60 year old, ongoing comic book continuity, my friend. Who has not was it Doctor Doom or Iron Man? I’m pretty sure I was Iron Man for an issue or two in 1989.
But there is one very simple answer to this question. It is an obvious step to get Doctor Doom right, but it is something that Hollywood has so far steadfastly refused to do.
Downey Jr. better keep that damn mask on.
Image: John Romita Jr./Marvel Comics
Hollywood has a notorious struggle with how to portray fully masked characters. Movie actors don’t like signing up for roles where they’re not really recognizable on screen, and gaining that stardom that could make them (or at least into) household names. Any actor might be skeptical about taking on a role where their metaphorical hands—or their literal faces—are tied behind their backs.
Karl Urban insisted on keeping his helmet on DreddBut called it a “very challenging process,” Spike Lee admitted in the director’s commentary of Inside Man that he changed the film’s script after hearing Clive Owens’ concerns. Marvel films have historically made many concessions in this area: Spider-Man, Ant-Man, the Wasp, Black Panther, Iron Man, and War Machine constantly remove their masks or helmets for crucial conversations, even in the heat of battle. The innovation of the camera image inside the helmet was a brilliant solution to the problem, without which the Iron Man franchise might never have succeeded.
Previous Fantastic Four films have evaded the idea of a masked villain by insisting on making Victor Von Doom a supporting character, with his origin story told alongside that of the Fantastic Four. Starring Julian McMahon (in the 2005 film) Fantastic four) and Toby Kebbell (in the 2015 version) were given ample time to show their faces before their characters underwent the transformations that left them reliant on masks.
In these films, Victor Von Doom isn’t just a regular guy we’re looking at, his mask isn’t even a mask — it’s just his face now, metal mixed with flesh. You’d never know this from the Fantastic Four movie adaptations, but in the comics, the point is that we never see Doom’s face. It might seem odd to demand that we respect him this superhero mask, while the superhero setting is so often about what’s underneath. But Doctor Doom’s mask is different from Spider-Man’s, Deadpool’s or Ant-Man’s.
The origin story of the comic Doom, which first takes place in 1962 Fantastic four #5, is classic Faustian. Even after being warned not to—and later stories would codify the dissenting voice as Reed Richards himself—Doom meddled with science and magic beyond his capabilities, ruined his face, and never forgave Reed for being right, or forgave the reality that refused to submit to his will.
The only person to ever do anything interesting by showing us Doctor Doom’s real face is the king of comics himself, Doom co-creator Jack Kirby. In his later career, Kirby would do a number of mask-less sketches of Doctor Doom that suggested that the ugliness Doom claimed was actually a single, small, superficial facial scar, and that Marvel’s most menacing mask wasn’t necessary to hide a hideous disfigurement but was a product of Doom’s inability to tolerate anything less than perfection.
What makes Doctor Doom a great villain is that the mask isn’t like Darth Vader’s theatrical prop. Wearing it is a choice. It’s a choice Doom would have made. even if he only had a paper cut on his face.
His mask isn’t, like the Phantom of the Opera’s concession to society’s disgust! Creators peel off the masks of characters like Vader and the Phantom to invite viewers to empathize with their vulnerability and humanity. But the whole reason Doom succeeds as the ür-supervillain is that he’d rather kill everyone in the universe than have them think he’s on their level. As Kirby’s sketches so succinctly put it, Doom’s mask isn’t about shame turned inward. It’s about hate turned outward.
Photo: Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney
But this does pose a problem for live-action adaptations. Not just in how to find a famous actor other than Doug Jones willing to show their performance only in voice, gesture and presence – but how do you find someone who can also make a star performance of that?
So boring and safe and expensive however it may be for Marvel Studios to resort to a completely known character like Robert Downey Jr. to play Doom, you can’t deny he’s a Awesome actor, and that playing Doom is a real challenge for him. He is also an actor who has had his time as literally the face of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
So the question isn’t, “How do you explain why Victor Von Doom looks like Tony Stark?” The solution is before us.
The question is, does Marvel Studios have the guts to give us the Doom we deserve without ever showing his face?