Robert Downey Jr. earned some of the best reviews of his life for Oppenheimer, his return to serious dramatic work post-Marvel. He’s even nabbed a bunch of awards for it. One of them was for Best Supporting Actor at the Critics’ Choice Awards. Is he grateful? Of course! But he couldn’t resist reading some of the more colorful slams certain reviewers threw at him.
Robert Downey Jr reads out what critics have said about him this year at the #CriticsChoiceAwards
“The first one’s like a Haiku, ‘sloppy, messy & lazy.’ Next one’s more metaphoric, ‘like Pee Wee Herman emerging from a coma.’”
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“I was thinking this morning, I love critics,” Downey told the crowd, some of whom couldn’t resist chuckling. “You know, they’ve given me such beautiful feedback, really just so many great moments, and some of it is so poetic.”
And so he read some of the rare pans he’s received for playing Lewis Strauss, the hissable bureaucrat who surreptitiously targeted J. Robert Oppenheimer over some perceived slights. Here are the ones he read out, though he didn’t attribute them to any specific writer:
- “The first one is kind of like Haiku: ‘Sloppy, messy and lazy.’”
- “The next one is more metaphoric: ‘Like Pee-Wee Herman emerging from a coma.’”
- “This was from a Brit: ‘A puzzling waste of talent.’”
- “And lastly, and this one lingered: ‘Amusing as a bed-locked fart.’”
Of course, Downey earned plenty of raves, some hailing it as not only a return to form after a decade-plus of mostly playing Tony Stark, but perhaps his finest work over his long, storied career. But you gotta take the sour with the sweet, and those insults aren’t half-bad. Besides, he could have read out the reviews for Dolittle.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)