Do we like Robert Downey Jr.?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A pardoned past, a climate fund and a public endorsement for Kamala Harris sit against a blackface role he has never regretted.
RDJ's story is a comeback before it is anything else. A 1996 speeding stop on the Pacific Coast Highway turned up cocaine, heroin and a pistol, and the felony drug conviction that followed ended with about a year in prison in 1999 after he admitted violating probation. Two decades later he stood on the Oscars stage and thanked his “terrible childhood” first.
Now the asterisk. On the Joe Rogan podcast in 2020 he called Tropic Thunder “an offensive nightmare” but said he doesn't regret making it, and said about nine in ten of his Black friends liked it. Where you land depends on whether you read Kirk Lazarus as a sharp swipe at Hollywood or as a white actor in blackface. He hasn't walked it back, and that's the one real mark on his harm record.
On the wider harm check, the searches found nothing nasty. I found no anti-LGBTQ or anti-trans remarks, no anti-vax or climate-denial claims, and no campaigning against any group. In late 2024 he joined Avengers co-stars in a video endorsing Kamala Harris. In 2019 he unveiled the FootPrint Coalition, an environmental venture, at Amazon's Re:MARS conference. The record on trans issues specifically is thin: I found no statements either way.
Nothing fresh and verifiable turned up for me lately. The most recent clear item is his 2024 chat on the Kara Swisher podcast, where he said he'd sue any future executive who recreated him with AI. He joked that “my law firm will still be very active.” It's a performer protecting his likeness, and it lines up with the screen actors' side of that fight.
The good stuff is mostly the work and the endurance. He won his first Oscar in March 2024, for Oppenheimer, and said he “needed this job more than it needed me”. He shaped his own second act, and his environmental venture is more than a photo op. It isn't a saint's file, but it's a long way from a villain's.
So would we support him? Yes, comfortably. He passes the good-person test, and he gets an asterisk on harm for the Tropic Thunder stance, not for anything he's done to hurt anyone since. Check back when the next press tour kicks off and he's asked about it again.