Robert Downey Jr. Didn’t Think He Clicked With Christopher Nolan When They Met for ‘Batman Begins’
Robert Downey Jr. would team up for the first time with Christopher Nolan for the the Oscar-winning project Oppenheimer. But years earlier, there was another film that Downey hoped to work with Nolan on. Unfortunately, Downey sensed their meeting wasn’t going how he wanted it to.
Robert Downey Jr. described one of his first meetings with Christopher Nolan
Before he was Iron Man, Downey was looking to get cast as a super villain instead. The actor met with Nolan to discuss playing the villain Scarecrow in 2004’s Batman Begins. The role would famously end up being played by Cillian Murphy, starting his decades-long partnership with Nolan.
Murphy’s Scarecrow was also the only villain who was featured in all three of Nolan’s Batman movies. It also appeared that Nolan clicked with Murphy much more than he did with Downey. During their conversation, Downey could tell very early on that their talk went cold.
“I’m pretty sure I heard about [this role] and I was like, ‘I’m Scarecrow,’” Downey once told The Playlist. “And then I remember meeting [Nolan] for tea and I was like, ‘He doesn’t seem like he’s really in on this interview.’ And he was polite and all that. But you can tell when someone is kind of like, ‘It’s not going to go anywhere.’”
Years later, Downey would collaborate with both Nolan and Murphy on the highly successful Oppenheimer feature. Oppenheimer couldn’t have come at a better time for Downey. After his long stint as Iron Man, he was looking for new challenges in his career when the feature showed up at his doorstep.
“I was at a place in my life in my career, where I needed someone to have a vision of what was possible for me that I couldn’t see for myself,” Downey said.
In an interview with the New York Times, Nolan told Downey why he was rejected for Begins. It turned out, Nolan might’ve already had Murphy in mind for Scarecrow before their meeting. But Nolan was such a fan of the Tropic Thunder star that he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to speak with him.
“In my head that was already cast. But I always wanted to meet you,” Nolan told Downey. “I was a huge admirer of yours and therefore selfishly just wanted to take the meeting.”
Nolan also confided that Downey’s sketchy past made him hesitant on hiring him back then.
“But I was also a little afraid of you, you know. I had heard all kinds of stories about how you were crazy. It was only a few years after the last of those stories that had come out about you,” he said.
Christopher Nolan called Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man the most consequential casting of all time
Missing out on playing Scarecrow wasn’t that big of a loss for Downey, who’d end up having a much bigger role in Iron Man. Becoming Tony Stark didn’t just see him lead his own superhero movies, but becoming the face of an entire franchise for a decade.
“He has such charisma as Tony Stark,” Nolan said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “I think him playing Iron Man is one of the most consequential casting decisions that’s ever been made in the history of the movie business. And I wanted to give him the opportunity to lose himself in a part, lose himself in another human being the way that great actors love to.”
However, Downey’s role as Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer couldn’t have been any more different than Tony Stark. Downey’s wife, Susan Downey, commended Nolan on seeing what Downey had to offer beyond the charming billionaire.
“I think what was incredible is that Chris saw in Robert what he could be if you took all of his tools away, all the wonderful things that are very charming, very charismatic, and looked for the stillness,” she told Vanity Fair.
