Robert Downey Jr. has once again defended Tropic Thunder after receiving criticism for wearing blackface in the 2008 movie.
The satirical action comedy film - which was directed by Ben Stiller - tells the story of a group of actors who were shooting a big-budget war movie and were forced to become the soldiers they were portraying.
The 58-year-old Iron Man star played a character named Kirk Lazarus, a man that saw him physically turn himself from a white man to a Black man - a more common name for the process is "blackface".
The flick, which also starred Jay Baruchel, Jack Black, and Tom Cruise, was a hit at the box office - ranking in an impressive $195.7 million, and won the Critics Choice Movie Award for Best Comedy in 2009.
For almost two decades, the movie was heavily denounced by viewers for several reasons including the depiction of disabled people and minority groups, but more specifically Downey Jr, a non-black performer, using theatrical makeup to portray a caricature of a Black person.
Back in 2020, the Marvel actor spoke about the backlash during an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, revealing that his mother was "horrified" about him taking on the role.
"When Ben called and said, 'Hey I’m doing this thing' - you know I think Sean Penn had passed on it or something. Possibly wisely. And I thought, 'Yeah, I’ll do that and I’ll do that after Iron Man," he shared. "Then I started thinking, 'This is a terrible idea, wait a minute.' Then I thought, 'Well hold on dude, get real here, where is your heart?'"
"My heart is... I get to be black for a summer in my mind, so there’s something in it for me. The other thing is, I get to hold up to nature the insane self-involved hypocrisy of artists and what they think they’re allowed to do on occasion, just my opinion," he added.
The Marvel star went on to claim that "90 percent of [his] Black friends" referred to the movie as "great," adding: "[Ben Stiller] knew exactly what the vision for this was, he executed it, it was impossible to not have it be an offensive nightmare of a movie."
The Oppenheimer star opened up about the criticism again during his recent appearance on Rob Lowe’s Literally! podcast, and made comparisons to Norman Lear’s sitcom All in the Family, which also focused on racism themes.
"I was looking back at ‘All in the Family,’ and they had a little disclaimer that they were running at the beginning of the show," he said, per Movie Web. "People should look it up, exactly what it is, because it is an antidote to this clickbait addiction to grievance that [people seem] to have with everything these days."
"The language was saying, 'Hey, this is the reason that we’re doing these things that, in a vacuum, you could pick apart and say are wrong and bad,'" he continued, adding that there "used to be an understanding with an audience" but now "things have gotten very muddied".
Downey Jr. went on to praise the director, noting that Stiller aimed to fight "against all of these tropes that are not right and [that] had been perpetuated for too long".
In addition to this, the 58-year-old Night at the Museum actor - who played Tugg Speedman in the film - previously revealed on X that he is still "proud" of the comedy movie, writing: "I make no apologies for Tropic Thunder."
"It’s always been a controversial movie since when we opened. Proud of it and the work everyone did on it," he added.
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