‘I was super-starstruck’: Robert Downey Jr. invited a nervous Marvel newbie to his personal on-set ‘village’ after he made him laugh

Celebrities, they’re just like us, kinda! Well, in that they get star struck by Robert Downey Jr. Which begs the question, who does RDJ get starstruck over? Maybe aliens or something. Anyway, we’re here to tell you about the time Daniel Brühl got to visit RDJ’s on-set “village,” and marvel over the fact that RDJ had his own “village.”

Brühl currently stars in the superhero adjacent show The Franchise, a satirical comedy on Max about a director who’s filming a blockbuster superhero movie called “Tecto: Eye of the Storm.” The movie is rife with problems and inches from collapse, but of course that’s where all the comedy comes from.

Brühl’s Franchise character, struggling director Eric, is going to get an on-set visit from none other than The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan. This obviously makes him pretty nervous. In real life, Brühl has some impressive superhero credentials of his own: he played Baron Zemo in Captain America: Civil War, alongside RDJ himself.

In a recent interview, Brühl revealed that even though he was on a movie alongside the famous actor, he was still intimidated. Apparently, when the two met on set, Brühl made a joke that made RDJ laugh so hard he immediately won the Iron Man actor over.

“I came to this gigantic park like the new kid at school. I really felt like a schoolboy again,” Brühl said. “I remember the first day I had with Downey Jr., we had a scene together and I made some sort of joke and he laughed forever. He then said, ‘Oh you are funny, do you have allergies?’ I was like, ‘Allergies?'”

Later that same day, Brühl was enjoying a burrito when he got a knock on his trailer door. This is where things get wild. “… somebody knocked at my door to say, ‘You have cordially been invited to Robert Downey Jr.’s village to have lunch’. I was like, ‘Village?’ I put down my burrito and was driven there.”

That’s a level of fame that maybe one percent of one percent of people will ever experience. Your own village on a Marvel set? You can’t make this stuff up.

When Brühl arrived at said village, there was a big fence and a bouncer to get through. Once inside, Brühl said RDJ couldn’t have been more cordial. “He treated me so nicely, gave me a present, and I was like, ‘This is a dear diary moment’. I was super starstruck.”

How big was the village? According to this 2016 article, it’s like five big campers, and it definitely made his co-stars jealous. “Robert actually has the smallest trailer. He just has another four trailers around it,” quipped Paul Bettany, who plays Vision in the MCU.

RDJ will have a whole ‘nother chance to bring back the village, because he’s playing Dr. Doom in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday.

As for Brühl, he said his inspiration for his role as Eric the struggling director came from a real life experience of working on a terrible movie he called a “total disaster.” Ever the professional, he wisely won’t name the movie.

“The ship slowly sank the minute I arrived basically and there was no way out, so it was so depressing – arriving day one and there being no going back, no possibility of saving this thing. I remember my sad, grey face every evening that I came home, looking in front of the mirror, trying to encourage me to survive the rest of the journey.”