20 years ago this month, Robert Downey Jr. was arrested while already on parole after a police officer found him wandering barefoot in California, where he tested positive for cocaine. This incident led to him being fired from his Golden Globe winning role on Ally McBeal, cost him a part in smash hit rom-com America’s Sweethearts, forced Mel Gibson to cancel his planned stage adaptation of Hamlet with the actor, and saw him sent to rehab and handed three years of probation after he pleaded no contest to avoid jail time.
It would be fair to say that the 56 year-old has come a long, long way since then, with the clean and sober RDJ now comfortably established as one of the biggest and most popular movie stars on the planet thanks to his iconic tenure as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Tony Stark. He’s earned hundreds of millions of dollars from the MCU, and when you take home that kind of bank, you need a sizeable entourage to go with it.
In a new interview, Iron Man 3 star Guy Pearce revealed the differences between actors like himself and megastars such as Downey Jr. and Vin Diesel, who he worked with on last year’s comic book adaptation Bloodshot, detailing the extravagant lives they live even when the cameras aren’t rolling.
“Both of them were hilarious in that they live in their own sort of universe and that they have a ton of trailers. They have their own food truck and their own personal trainer and their own gym and their own trailer for family, etc., etc. And that’s just another world from what I’m used to. They were both delightful, like absolutely delightful people who would say, ‘Guy, come on in and have lunch and spend some time’. They really just want to get to know who you are, I think. So in the face of the kind of worlds that they live in, to be able to sort of experience that with them and share that with them was really quite a treat, to be honest. I adored both of them.”
There’s definitely a distinct difference between being an Actor with a capital ‘A’ and being a movie star, with Downey Jr. and Diesel definitely falling into the latter camp. And if those were the kind of luxuries the MCU’s marquee name had at his disposal during Iron Man 3, you can only imagine what he ended up with on Avengers: Endgame after he’d renegotiated his contract several times.