Robert Downey Jr.

This episode originally aired July 22, 2025 The spotlight has certainly taken its toll on Robert Downey Jr. over the years. But much like his beloved MCU character Tony Stark, there's an undeniably powerful force inside Robert that keeps him pushing forward. When we sat down over iced coffees, we found ourselves unpacking the fraught relationship Robert had with his father — the experimental, countercultural filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. — whose unconventional lifestyle created lasting ripples throughout the family. Their shared documentary, “Sr.”, stands as a powerful testament to the healing they found. Plus, we talk about sobriety, the belief it took to become Iron Man, and the full-circle moments spanning the decades since we first crossed paths on the set of Chaplin. Follow me on Instagram at @davidduchovny. Find more video podcasts on our YouTube channel . Stay up to date with Lemonada on X , Facebook and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia. Joining Lemonada Premium is a great way to support our shows and get bonus content. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or wherever you get your podcasts. For a list of current sponsors and discount codes for this and every other Lemonada show, go to lemonadamedia.com/sponsors . See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you've been handed everything and still feel hollow at 11pm, listen to Robert Downey Jr.'s morning routine for starting over, the gifted boy who became a star before he became a person, and lost fifteen years to substance before he chose to come back differently. You don't need a Hollywood life to recognise the shape of his collapse, or the quieter shape of what rebuilt him. Tonight works as long-form sleep; the second half runs as morning motivation or a companion for the drive home, a slow study in the decisions that turn a comeback permanent. For meaning more than drama: small daily discipline, the marriage that anchored him, the man he became once he stopped running. Robert Downey Jr. is now used as a symbol of comeback, the way certain words get used to sell things. Tonight we put the symbol down and sit with the actual man. Key takeaways: • The hollow feeling of a life people envy while you're unraveling inside, Robert Downey Jr. names it, then teaches the way out. • The exact decision that turned his comeback permanent, not motivation, not rock bottom, just being done running. • Why external wins don't resolve internal chaos, the reframe if you've achieved the goal and still feel empty at 11pm. • Small daily discipline replacing willpower: the routine that rebuilt him when desire alone wasn't enough. Copy it tomorrow. • What felt like wasted years was preparation for a purpose he couldn't have handled earlier. Permission for the time you 'lost'. Timestamps: (00:00:00) Robert Downey Jr.'s Rule for Climbing Out of Rock Bottom (00:00:14) A Child Actor in His Father's Strange New York (00:01:51) Downey in Less Than Zero and the First Warning (00:06:22) The Chaplin Oscar Nomination Downey Nearly Missed (00:10:20) The Arrests of 1996 and the House of the Wrong Bed (00:17:12) California's Corcoran State Prison at 36 (00:23:12) The Studio Phone Call Downey Never Thought Would Come (00:29:10) Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and the Quiet Comeback of 2005 (00:36:03) Jon Favreau Bets on Downey for Iron Man (00:42:29) Downey's Morning Routine That Rebuilt Everything (00:48:54) The Philosophy of Acting As If, Downey's Rule (00:54:41) Radical Responsibility and the End of Running (00:59:29) What Downey Said to the Son Who Followed Him In (01:06:21) Downey's Quiet Lesson for a Restless Mind (01:13:47) Why Your Past Does Not Have to Be Your Prologue ⭐ Rate on Spotify or Apple, it helps quiet voices reach the people who need them. 💬 Comment where you're listening from, what time it is there, and anything you enjoyed about one of our recent episodes! DISCLAIMER ⚠️ This video is for informational & entertainment purposes only. It explores psychological & historical concepts but is not professional advice (legal, medical, or otherwise). #SleepDocumentary #WisdomForSleep #SleepStory #Mindfulness #FallAsleep #boringhistory #historyforsleep #RobertDowneyJr #ComebackStory #Reinvention #HollywoodHistory #Recovery

The spotlight has certainly taken its toll on Robert Downey Jr. over the years. But much like his beloved MCU character Tony Stark, there's an undeniably powerful force inside Robert that keeps him pushing forward. When we sat down over iced coffees, we found ourselves unpacking the fraught relationship Robert had with his father — the experimental, countercultural filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. — whose unconventional lifestyle created lasting ripples throughout the family. Their shared documentary, “Sr.”, stands as a powerful testament to the healing they found. Plus, we talk about sobriety, the belief it took to become Iron Man, and the full-circle moments spanning the decades since we first crossed paths on the set of Chaplin. Follow me on Instagram at @davidduchovny. Find more video podcasts on our YouTube channel . Stay up to date with Lemonada on X , Facebook and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia. Joining Lemonada Premium is a great way to support our shows and get bonus content. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or wherever you get your podcasts. For a list of current sponsors and discount codes for this and every other Lemonada show, go to lemonadamedia.com/sponsors . See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What are the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions in times of war? How can the arts convey complexity and foster understanding? Don McKellar is a highly accomplished writer, director, and actor. He has written films including Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, The Red Violin, and Blindness. He won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut, Last Night, which he also wrote and starred in. He is an eight-time Genie Award nominee and a two-time winner. He wrote the book for the acclaimed musical The Drowsy Chaperone, for which he received a Tony Award. Most recently, Don served as writer, executive producer, and co-showrunner on The Sympathizer, a television adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The series was co-created with Park Chan-wook."I think the reason for success of the novel The Sympathizer was the very unique voice in the book. It's told in first person with this kind of raconteur who's very intelligent. It's satiric. It tackles big issues, and it's very lively and fun at the same time. It's quite and it's also complicated where it's coming from. It's a confession. It's written in theory under duress. It's very hard to replicate because it's sort of very freewheeling, and we didn't want to weigh the show down with just a lot of voiceover, you know, that feeling of a literary adaptation you get where you just have a voiceover quoting the book all the time. So, the first thing we tried to do, well, the first thing we did was get Park Chan-wook involved because he has a very similar visual language. We tried to replicate that voice visually, and we've tried to come up with parallel visual narrative devices that would give that feeling that the book had." www.imdb.com/name/nm0001528/mediaviewer/rm2411273728/?ref_=nm_ov_ph www.imdb.com/title/tt14404618/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_the%20sympa www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast Photos courtesy of HBO Susan Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Don McKellar Robert Downey Jr. in The Sympathizer, photo by Beth Dubber/HBO Hoa Xuande in The Sympathizer, photo by Hopper Stone/HBO

What are the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions in times of war? How can the arts convey complexity and foster understanding? Don McKellar is a highly accomplished writer, director, and actor. He has written films including Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, The Red Violin, and Blindness. He won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut, Last Night, which he also wrote and starred in. He is an eight-time Genie Award nominee and a two-time winner. He wrote the book for the acclaimed musical The Drowsy Chaperone, for which he received a Tony Award. Most recently, Don served as writer, executive producer, and co-showrunner on The Sympathizer, a television adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The series was co-created with Park Chan-wook."I think the reason for success of the novel The Sympathizer was the very unique voice in the book. It's told in first person with this kind of raconteur who's very intelligent. It's satiric. It tackles big issues, and it's very lively and fun at the same time. It's quite and it's also complicated where it's coming from. It's a confession. It's written in theory under duress. It's very hard to replicate because it's sort of very freewheeling, and we didn't want to weigh the show down with just a lot of voiceover, you know, that feeling of a literary adaptation you get where you just have a voiceover quoting the book all the time. So, the first thing we tried to do, well, the first thing we did was get Park Chan-wook involved because he has a very similar visual language. We tried to replicate that voice visually, and we've tried to come up with parallel visual narrative devices that would give that feeling that the book had." www.imdb.com/name/nm0001528/mediaviewer/rm2411273728/?ref_=nm_ov_ph www.imdb.com/title/tt14404618/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_the%20sympa www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast Photos courtesy of HBO Susan Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Don McKellar Robert Downey Jr. in The Sympathizer, photo by Beth Dubber/HBO Hoa Xuande in The Sympathizer, photo by Hopper Stone/HBO

What are the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions in times of war? How can the arts convey complexity and foster understanding? Don McKellar is a highly accomplished writer, director, and actor. He has written films including Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, The Red Violin, and Blindness. He won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut, Last Night, which he also wrote and starred in. He is an eight-time Genie Award nominee and a two-time winner. He wrote the book for the acclaimed musical The Drowsy Chaperone, for which he received a Tony Award. Most recently, Don served as writer, executive producer, and co-showrunner on The Sympathizer, a television adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The series was co-created with Park Chan-wook. "Casting of The Captain (Hoa Xuande) was very hard because it's really all from his perspective. The whole thing is on his shoulders. He's in almost every scene. And when he isn't, it's from his point of view, so he's a spy, you know, so he's got to be able to have that poker face. He's got to be able...it can't be on the surface. He's got to have a certain amount of control. So we had to have someone who was very emotional, but at the same time had a lot of control, who was very agile in a way, like the narrative of the book is, who is able to quickly change modes and at the same time sort of evoke the protagonists of American 70s action films, except from a Vietnamese side.” On casting Robert Downey Jr. in 4 Roles: "That was Park Chan-wook's idea early on. In the book, there are these sorts of male-white figures of the American establishment. They're all differentiated in the book, but he had the idea. What if we have one actor playing all the parts kind of like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove and immediately we thought that's a great idea. Robert Downey Jr.'s characters represent academia, intelligence in the military, entertainment, and politics. Even if they have opposing political ideas on the surface, there's something at the root that is working together. It's a kind of deep-state metaphor and - I don't want to give away the ending of the series - but it comes together in a way that feeds into The Captain's character, too." www.imdb.com/name/nm0001528/mediaviewer/rm2411273728/?ref_=nm_ov_ph www.imdb.com/title/tt14404618/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_the%20sympa www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast Photos courtesy of HBO Susan Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Don McKellar Robert Downey Jr. in The Sympathizer, photo by Beth Dubber/HBO Hoa Xuande in The Sympathizer, photo by Hopper Stone/HBO

What are the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions in times of war? How can the arts convey complexity and foster understanding? Don McKellar is a highly accomplished writer, director, and actor. He has written films including Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, The Red Violin, and Blindness. He won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut, Last Night, which he also wrote and starred in. He is an eight-time Genie Award nominee and a two-time winner. He wrote the book for the acclaimed musical The Drowsy Chaperone, for which he received a Tony Award. Most recently, Don served as writer, executive producer, and co-showrunner on The Sympathizer, a television adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The series was co-created with Park Chan-wook. “Doubling is kind of a big theme, and maybe it always is in spy literature, but maybe I think that that's why Viet chose to write a spy novel in a way and play with those sort of tropes because it's central and I think it's central to the message of the show and of the book. This idea that there's another side to every question. I mean, that's the central quandary. There's this problem with the whole Vietnam War. It's saying to Americans, at least put yourself on the other side, the Vietnamese side, and then recognize that that side also has two sides and then within that, there are further divisions. And if you do that, I think what it's proposing is that you have to step back. It forces a sort of objectivity and humility, and it asks you to step back and allow the bigger human questions to resonate." www.imdb.com/name/nm0001528/mediaviewer/rm2411273728/?ref_=nm_ov_ph www.imdb.com/title/tt14404618/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_the%20sympa www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast Photos courtesy of HBO Susan Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Don McKellar Robert Downey Jr. in The Sympathizer, photo by Beth Dubber/HBO Hoa Xuande in The Sympathizer, photo by Hopper Stone/HBO

What are the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions in times of war? How can the arts convey complexity and foster understanding? Don McKellar is a highly accomplished writer, director, and actor. He has written films including Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, The Red Violin, and Blindness. He won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut, Last Night, which he also wrote and starred in. He is an eight-time Genie Award nominee and a two-time winner. He wrote the book for the acclaimed musical The Drowsy Chaperone, for which he received a Tony Award. Most recently, Don served as writer, executive producer, and co-showrunner on The Sympathizer, a television adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The series was co-created with Park Chan-wook. “Doubling is kind of a big theme, and maybe it always is in spy literature, but maybe I think that that's why Viet chose to write a spy novel in a way and play with those sort of tropes because it's central and I think it's central to the message of the show and of the book. This idea that there's another side to every question. I mean, that's the central quandary. There's this problem with the whole Vietnam War. It's saying to Americans, at least put yourself on the other side, the Vietnamese side, and then recognize that that side also has two sides and then within that, there are further divisions. And if you do that, I think what it's proposing is that you have to step back. It forces a sort of objectivity and humility, and it asks you to step back and allow the bigger human questions to resonate." www.imdb.com/name/nm0001528/mediaviewer/rm2411273728/?ref_=nm_ov_ph www.imdb.com/title/tt14404618/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_the%20sympa www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast Photos courtesy of HBO Susan Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Don McKellar Robert Downey Jr. in The Sympathizer, photo by Beth Dubber/HBO Hoa Xuande in The Sympathizer, photo by Hopper Stone/HBO

What are the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions in times of war? How can the arts convey complexity and foster understanding? Don McKellar is a highly accomplished writer, director, and actor. He has written films including Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, The Red Violin, and Blindness. He won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut, Last Night, which he also wrote and starred in. He is an eight-time Genie Award nominee and a two-time winner. He wrote the book for the acclaimed musical The Drowsy Chaperone, for which he received a Tony Award. Most recently, Don served as writer, executive producer, and co-showrunner on The Sympathizer, a television adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The series was co-created with Park Chan-wook. "Right from the beginning, in talking with Park Chan-wook, we wanted this sort of multiplicity of narrative voices and devices. In a way, it's about how the story, in this case of the Vietnam War, has been told, what the expected story is, at least, for American viewers, which they may mainly know through the movies and through visual representations. And it's how our lead character, The Captain, who is writing the story, who has divided loyalties. How can we capture the contradictions within that story? And we tried to make that complexity part of the actual fabric of the show." www.imdb.com/name/nm0001528/mediaviewer/rm2411273728/?ref_=nm_ov_ph www.imdb.com/title/tt14404618/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_the%20sympa www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast Photos courtesy of HBO Susan Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Don McKellar Robert Downey Jr. in The Sympathizer, photo by Beth Dubber/HBO Hoa Xuande in The Sympathizer, photo by Hopper Stone/HBO

What are the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions in times of war? How can the arts convey complexity and foster understanding? Don McKellar is a highly accomplished writer, director, and actor. He has written films including Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside, The Red Violin, and Blindness. He won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival for his directorial debut, Last Night, which he also wrote and starred in. He is an eight-time Genie Award nominee and a two-time winner. He wrote the book for the acclaimed musical The Drowsy Chaperone, for which he received a Tony Award. Most recently, Don served as writer, executive producer, and co-showrunner on The Sympathizer, a television adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The series was co-created with Park Chan-wook. "What saved me as a young person, I think, was how I connected with the arts. And I was exposed to this sort of world of possibility. What I hope for children is sort of courageous curiosity. I feel that they have to pursue their creative impulses, and I hope that art can inspire them to do that. That's what I always do. When I'm creating work, I always want it to be inspiring in a way. Not inspiring like a Hallmark movie, you know, like not happy, not necessarily, but provocative in a way that inspires thought, inspires creativity. So when I see young people, what I always try and encourage in them is sort of courage. Courage at facing the world, not being afraid of the world, and being. And I think that art can provide that, can bolster that courage." www.imdb.com/name/nm0001528/mediaviewer/rm2411273728/?ref_=nm_ov_ph www.imdb.com/title/tt14404618/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_the%20sympa www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast Photos courtesy of HBO Susan Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Don McKellar Robert Downey Jr. in The Sympathizer, photo by Beth Dubber/HBO Hoa Xuande in The Sympathizer, photo by Hopper Stone/HBO