Robert Downey Jr Had One Big Regret About Leaving Iron Man

Even when you're ready to move on, it can be difficult to leave a job that you've been in for a while. In the case of Robert Downey Jr., who played Tony Stark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for over a decade, this was certainly the case. After a long and complicated career in Hollywood, during which time he experienced many ups and downs, Downey transcended into a higher plane of stardom when he took on the role of charismatic arms manufacturer Tony Stark in "Iron Man" back in 2008.

At that time, there was no guarantee that the film would be a success or that the whole Avengers gambit that the then-new Marvel Studios was betting on would actually pay off. After all, Iron Man was hardly a fan-favorite comic book character to begin with, and the superhero genre had been hit or miss at the box office for years. But when it worked, it really worked. And following the massive phenomenon of that first film, Downey stepped back into the armor and played the character dutifully over the course of eight more movies (plus an uncredited cameo in '08's "The Incredible Hulk"). In doing so, he helped to create one of the movie industry's biggest moneymaking franchises of all time and became one of Marvel's most valuable players in the process.

But eventually, even the most fun (and lucrative) role can become creatively stifling. Any actor would begin to wonder about what other opportunities they were missing out on, and Downey, who had become the de facto face of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, found himself starting to hunger for something different. As Downey revealed in an interview with The New York Times Magazine, the question quickly became, "How long is too long to spend in a single role?"

"You start to wonder," Robert Downey Jr. confessed to The New York Times Magazine, "if a muscle you have hasn't atrophied." After so many years as Tony Stark, the actor dove headfirst into his first big non-Marvel role — which turned out to be the disastrous "Dolittle." Though he and his team had been excited by the possibility of him headlining a project the star hoped would become a "big, fun, well-executed potential franchise," it didn't turn out that way. Nor was it the type of project you'd want to tackle in order to prove to yourself that you can still hack it as an actor.

It was a relief, then, when he was approached by Christopher Nolan to play the petty, vindictive Lewis Strauss in "Oppenheimer." The role saw his character spend decades nursing a one-sided grudge against Cillian Murphy's J. Robert Oppenheimer and earned Downey an Academy Award. The actor admitted that he had concerns about tackling such a part after spending so much time embodying Marvel's Tony Stark, a character that had relied on what he refers to as his "go-to things ... the fast-talking, charming, unpredictable, blah, blah, blah, or as my very close friend Josh Richman, a character actor, used to say, I made my bones playing 'Milo, the offbeat buddy.'" But ultimately, "Oppenheimer" made him eager to embrace the challenge, which would strip him of any affectations he could lean on as a crutch.

It was a gamble, it would seem, that paid off, given the astronomical success of the film. Now, Downey gets to have his cake and eat it too, having the validation of giving an Oscar-winning performance and then getting another, absolutely massive Marvel paycheck for his upcoming performance as Doctor Doom. Not too shabby!