Robert Downey Jr. proves we didn’t run out of real movie stars, we ran out of real movies

23.01.2024 - 13:55 / polygon.com / Robert Downey-Junior / Tony Stark / Tom Cruise

For years now, pundits have been declaring that movie stardom is dead. Everyone from Jennifer Aniston to The New York Times seems to have agreed that we simply don’t make ’em like we used to.

When people talk about “movie stars” — as opposed to just anyone who stars in a movie — they specifically mean those rare individuals gifted with so much on-screen charm and charisma that they’re impossible to look away from. They’re people who could open movies and send the audience to theaters in droves with nothing more than their name on a poster — above the title of the movie, of course. When audiences of the past went to see movies led by Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Tom Cruise, Cary Grant, Paul Newman, or Katharine Hepburn, it didn’t matter what character they were playing, because everyone knew they’d bring that indefinable excellence to a role. Or at least they used to.

The pundits say the stars we have are aging out, though, and that the comic book movies dominating the cultural landscape aren’t making new ones to fill the void. Robert Downey Jr.’s newly Oscar-nominated performance in Oppenheimeris a compelling data point for that argument. It proves that the problem isn’t that actors can’t handle stardom anymore — it’s that they aren’t getting the kinds of roles that properly project their charisma.

Downey is a special case that makes this clear. He was right on the edge of true movie stardom in the 1990s, following a stint on Saturday Night Live with a string of modest hits like Soapdish and Air America and an Oscar nomination for Chaplin. But Downey fell off in the early 2000s, appearing in far fewer films and even fewer box-office hits. Iron Man in 2008, and his recurring role as Tony Stark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies that followed, launched RDJ’s career into the stratosphere and made him a superstar. He’s the only one who got that level of fame boost from the Marvel machine, though. And getting there required him to start off with almost two decades of public notability and great acting.

After a decade in the Marvel Cinematic industrial complex — a machine that grew increasingly efficient at making money without established star power during his tenure — RDJ has mostly been lost in the moviemaking wilderness. At least until Oppenheimer.

In Christopher Nolan’s epic about the man behind the atomic bomb, Downey turns in a career-best performance. As U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss, he sheds his frequent sarcasm and vanity to play an ambitious, backbiting coward. Strauss’ puffed-up pettiness comes through in Downey’s every gesture and word without ever slipping into cartoonish showiness. In what is otherwise an enormous movie, Downey trusts that his brand of