Robert Downey Jr. didn’t feel bad about putting on blackface for Tropic Thunder, and he talked about how people reacted to the movie.
Tropic Thunder is brought up as an example of a movie that you couldn’t make today. The fact that a white actor (Robert Downey Jr.) wore blackface in the war movie parody made it stand out.
In Tropic Thunder, Robert Downey Jr. plays a guy who is dressed up as another guy. That is, he is the pretentious Australian method actor Kirk Lazarus, who plays Sgt. Lincoln Osiris.
Since the character Robert Downey Jr. is playing is black, he wore blackface for the role. Even though it’s shown as controversial in the movie, he’s still gotten criticism for doing it.
Other characters in Tropic Thunder talk about Lazarus’s use of blackface. For example, Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) picks on Lazarus when the actors stop to argue about their characters.
Robert Downey Jr. talked on The Joe Rogan Experience about why he took the role and how he doesn’t regret playing the controversial part, even though he did say he sometimes felt bad about it.
He said:
I thought ‘yeah I’ll do that, I’ll do that after Iron Man‘ and then I started thinking ‘this is a terrible idea, wait a minute’.
Then I thought ‘hold on dude, get real here where is your heart’ and my heart is: A, I get to be black for a summer in my mind, so that’s in it for me.
The other thing is I get to hold up to nature the insane self-involved hypocrisy of artists and what they think they’re allowed to do on occasion, just my opinion.
Robert Downey Jr. went on to say that it was “impossible to not have it be an offensive nightmare of a movie,” but that about 90% of his black friends had told him, “dude, that was great” after seeing Tropic Thunder.
When asked about the people who didn’t agree, the actor said,
can’t disagree with them but I know where my heart was.
Even though it’s a movie that people say you couldn’t make today, there are still a lot of people who find it very funny and don’t mind what Downey Jr. did.
Jackson, who was also in Tropic Thunder, said that the movie “wouldn’t work right now” because people’s opinions have become more divided, but he wasn’t offended by the blackface.
Jamie Foxx also talked about it on The Joe Rogan Experience, saying that he once told Robert Downey Jr.,
You played the black guy, and you killed that s**t.
Fans recently told Tropic Thunder director Ben Stiller to “stop apologizing” for the movie. Stiller replied that he would “make no apologies” for the movie and had always been proud of it.
Stiller said that the movie was always meant to poke fun at actors who do anything to win awards, as well as some of the most well-known Vietnam War movies.
