Robert Downey Jr said he would “happily” play Iron Man again. The 58-year-old actor portrayed Tony Stark and his superhero alter ego in 11 movies from 2008’s Iron Man to 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, and although his beloved character was killed off in the later movie, the Oscar-winning star insisted that doesn’t have to mean fans have seen the last of him.
He explained to Esquire magazine in a new interview: “It’s too integral a part of my DNA. That role chose me. And look, I always say, never, ever bet against Kevin Feige. It is a losing bet. He’s the house. He will always win.”
Elsewhere in the interview, his co-star Gwyneth Paltrow – who played Tony’s assistant and wife Pepper Potts – revealed she gave up learning her lines for the films because of Downey’s insistence on “throwing out” his scripts and improvising new dialogue at the last minute.
She said: “There would be this process of (director) Jon Favreau and Robert and I going into Jon’s trailer in the morning and Robert being like, ‘I’m not saying these lines’ and throwing them out.
“And then live improv-ing either in the trailer or on the set. I think in order for something to feel alive for Robert, it has to feel fresh, and he makes it fresh by making it feel like it was just invented.
“So many of those famous lines were written 10 minutes before we said them.”
Despite the Oppenheimer actor’s comments, in December, MCU boss Kevin Feige insisted there are no plans to “magically undo” the character’s death so he can make an appearance in future films in the blockbuster series.
Asked by America’s Vanity Fair magazine if Downey could return to the role, Kevin said: “We are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again.
“We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way.”
