Anyone else got a sneaking suspicion that Robert Downey Jr. and Tony Stark are actually the same person? They’re both super-rich bad boys with troubled pasts. Both excel in the same fields as their accomplished fathers. And both have a habit of treating interviews like one big joke, only occasionally trading confident quips for shots of insight.
Exhibit A: RDJ’s Daily Show appearance last night, in which the Iron Man 3 star blithely said that being an Avenger is like being a Beatle and joked that the original Superman didn’t really make him believe a man could fly, “because the effects weren’t very good back then.” It’s nice to know that even if this entry in the series is grimmer and bleaker than previous Iron Man tales, its star is still as flippant as he’s always been.
Downey did, however, drop the cool-kid act when saying how excited he is about this movie finally incorporating the Mandarin, a classic villain Downey’s been pitching since the first Iron Man flick. He also dabbled in fortune-cookie philosophy at the end of the interview, sagely recounting this proverb for Jon Stewart: “The optimist believes his future is uncertain. The pessimist is always right.”
