Robert Downey Jr. “had some reservations” about moving forward with Dolittle way before it flopped with audiences.
In a new interview with The New York Times Magazine published Monday, the actor reflected on his decision to star in and produce the 2020 film — which received harsh reviews from critics.
“I finished the Marvel contract and then hastily went into what had all the promise of being another big, fun, well-executed potential franchise in Dolittle,” Downey Jr., 52, explained to the outlet.
“I had some reservations,” he revealed. “Me and my team seemed a little too excited about the deal and not quite excited enough about the merits of the execution. But at that point I was bulletproof. I was the guru of all genre movies.”
Starring Downey Jr. as the eponymous famous doctor who can talk to animals, the 2020 movie is set in 19th century England and follows Dr. John Dolittle as he is forced out of his recluse to save a young Queen Victoria after she falls ill.
The Iron Man star told NYT that Dolittle was one of the “two most important films I’ve done in the last 25 years” because the film “was a two-and-a-half-year wound of squandered opportunity” in terms of its lost franchise potential.
“The stress it put on my missus as she rolled her sleeves up to her armpits to make it even serviceable enough to bring to market was shocking,” Downey Jr. said of the work the family film created for his wife Susan Downey, who also served as a producer.
“After that point — what’s that phrase? Never let a good crisis go to waste? — we had this reset of priorities and made some changes in who our closest business advisers were,” he shared.
The Marvel actor and his wife then turned their efforts into producing the Netflix documentary Sr., which centers around Downey Jr.’s relationship with his father Robert Downey Sr. during the elder Downey’s decline with Parkinson’s Disease.
“It’s a way for me to let myself know that just because this may be the most important thing that I ever commit to a data card on a camera, it doesn’t mean it isn’t [expletive] content to everyone else,” Downey Jr. told NYT of producing Sr.
The Avengers star is now following up the 2022 documentary with a starring role in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which debuts in theaters July 21.
The highly-anticipated drama is based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It follows J. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, who famously led the Manhattan Project — the effort to create an atomic bomb during World War II.
Downey portrays Lewis Strauss, a former United States Atomic Energy Commission chairman and the main antagonist of the titular physicist.
Oppenheimer’s A-list cast also boasts Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Kenneth Branagh, David Krumholtz and Josh Peck.
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