While his bravado and general charisma receive much of audiences’ attention, Robert Downey Jr.’s has a vastly underrated skill in conveying the softest emotions beneath his tough exterior. It’s a vulnerability that makes Tony Stark, particularly in this latest installment of Iron Man 3, one of the most unique and beloved superheroes, because it demonstrates his innate humanness in a genre that sometimes emphasizes the superhuman features of its heroes. And these are the most interesting of movie characters—the kind that present themselves one way, usually confident and daring, while subtly showing the tiniest signs that they’re terrified inside. In a sense, they’re just like us. And Tony’s distant relative Ned Stark would tell him that a person can only be truly brave when they’re afraid.
For Downey, though, expressing himself in subtle ways is not new territory. This is, after all, the guy who was tapped to play Charlie Chaplin, a giant of the silent era that relied on physically conveying the emotions and thoughts that are easily trotted out verbally in movies today. We also see his eyes working overtime in A Scanner Darkly, even though it’s a rotoscoped or animated version of him. And then of course Tropic Thunder was a master class, proving that you can, in fact, sometimes recognize an actor purely by the use of his eyes, even when the rest of him looks and sounds completely different.
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