A Born Entertainer, Honored at Santa Barbara International Film Festival, Robert Downey Jr. Does What He Does Best 

With an impish grin and a click of his red-soled Louboutin heels, Robert Downey Jr. had us laughing from the moment he took the stage — interviewed by the legendary Leonard Maltin no less — at last night’s Santa Barbara International Film Festival tribute. 

Honored by SBIFF with the Maltin Modern Master Award, in part for his critically acclaimed and Academy Award nominated role as Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer, Downey is that rare performer who is equally beloved by the public and by his peers. As his Oppenheimer co-star Cillian Murphy said when he came onstage at the Arlington Theatre to celebrate his colleague, “Robert works incredibly hard to make it look so easy, because all the great ones do.”

Clearly a born entertainer — one of the many retrospective clips shown was Downey at age 5, making his acting debut in his father Robert Downey Sr.’s film Pound in 1970 — Downey Jr.’s high energy and eagerness to make the evening as fun for himself as it was for the audience is an essential part of his charm, as are his very, very public struggles with substance abuse, arrests, rehab, and relapse, and eventual return to some of the consistently best work of his career.

As SBIFF executive director Roger Durling said in his opening remarks, those failures and “having struggles only to rise once again is what Robert Downey Jr. exemplifies. I think he’s just amazing.”

Maltin was perfectly correct when he said of Downey, “his resting face is a smile.” Indeed we were smiling all night, as they took us through highlights of his career, with spotlight clips and discussions about his work in Less Than Zero (a drug-themed film that Downey described as “a ghost of Christmas future”), Chances Are, True Believer, Chaplin (probably his most indelible performance for my money), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man, Tropic Thunder, Sherlock Holmes, Sr. (a 2022 documentary about his filmmaker father), and of course 2023’s Oppenheimer. 

Discussing that film and his deep admiration and respect for its director Christopher Nolan, Downey said, “It’s probably the best movie I’ve been a part of.” Downey described Murphy (who plays Robert Oppenheimer in the film) as giving a “clinic on what masterful acting is.” Adding that it “was an honor to be way under him on the call sheet.”

When Maltin asked “what do you want from a director?” speaking in general about the directors he’s worked with, such as Sir Richard Attenborough, Oliver Stone, Guy Ritchie, David Fincher, Shane Black, and Nolan, Downey said, “You just want to feel like you’re making them happy. It’s one of these weird things where you just want mom or dad to see you’re a good boy, like ‘hey you gave me this job.’”

Downey continued, “You want to commune with that director to the point that he and I or she and I become the character together.” 

Another member of Downey’s mutual admiration society, Rob Lowe, is a longtime buddy since their days at Santa Monica High School (a Hollywood adjacent public school that also includes Sean Penn, Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen, and Monica Lewinsky in its yearbooks). Lowe described some of his journeys with Downey over the years, including “getting out of addiction and getting out of the Brat Pack … and I’ve watched my lovely friend’s adventures that eventually brought him here tonight.”

Lowe concluded his award presentation with, “Robert’s story is being a once in a generation talent and courageous performer.” 

Downey was obviously touched by the kind words, but kept things entertaining and funny all the way through, including his final thank you’s to his agents — joking about getting matching pajamas and that “this whole SBIFF was party time for us” — and his wife and frequent film collaborator — “as always I will never finish any thank you without thanking my dearest and greatest associate — even though she’s probably just putting the kids to bed now — thank you Susan Downey.”