Happy birthday Robert Downey Jr: Revisiting RDJ’s role in Tropic Thunder

The film starred Downey, Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Jay Baruchel, and Danny McBride in pivotal roles. Tropic Thunder was directed by Stiller, with a hilarious script by Stiller, Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen.

Robert Downey Jr has been a part of quite a few successful movies in the past, and before Tropic Thunder, the actor had appeared in Marvel’s Iron Man in the same year. While Iron Man revived the actor’s career and got him his share of stardom, Ben Stiller’s underrated classic got Downey an Oscar nod.

Now Downey might not be in the same league as Daniel Day-Lewis and Al Pacino, but the man showed he has the skills in Tropic Thunder. He was tears-streaming-down-my-face funny, and that’s no exaggeration. All the sequences filmed with Downey and Brandon T Jackson, who plays a rapper-actor called Alpha Chino (not a pun on Al Pacino in any manner) in the film, are such show-stealers.

In the movie, Robert Downey Jr plays a method-actor who is literally willing to go to any extremes to portray his characters faithfully on screen. Now we know that people like that do exist. But since this is a movie and hyperboles are allowed, Kirk, aka Downey, undergoes a ‘pigment alteration’ surgery to do justice to his role. For the most part of the film, Downey’s character in the film is ‘playing’ a coloured man. But he overdoes it, almost to the point of an insult.

During a scene where Ben Stiller’s character is trying to get the band moving in a direction to get out of a jungle, he (Stiller) says, “I don’t believe you people”. To which an incredulous Kirk responds with “What do you mean, ‘you people’?” Kirk is obviously still in character and is pretending to get offended by what he has just heard. Meanwhile, Alpha Chino, who is really a coloured man, gets offended by Kirk’s pretense and asks him, “What do YOU mean, ‘you people?” Trust me, it’s better when you watch the thing.

Here’s the video:

There’s another scene where Alpha accidentally admits to being a homosexual and Kirk’s face is a thing to behold.

Yes, Tropic Thunder is great and Robert Downey Jr is glorious in it. But while raising some side-splitting laughs, the movie questions cultural misappropriation by Hollywood, and how actors can take it way over the top by trying to bring something to life on screen. A must-watch for the fans of Robert Downey Jr.