Robert Downey Jr. Walks Out of Interview After Reporter Badgers Him On Whether Or Not He's a Liberal, or Still Does Drugs

He doesn't want to say whether he's a liberal or Republican or whatever, which I usually take to be a Good Sign.

He's pretty evasive on it all, actually. I came in expecting to think the reporter was out of bounds, but I really don't think he is -- the reporter is curious about Downey's politics. I confess, I am too, and I wanted to know the answer. So I can't really criticize the reporter.*

The reporter is asking about this old NYT profile of Downey, much-cited by conservatives.

“I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every since.”

(Suffice it to say he is not one of the Hollywood types who weeps over innocents trapped behind bars.)

...

On or around Independence Day in 2003, he stopped at a Burger King on the Pacific Coast Highway and threw all his drugs in the ocean. And while he was sitting there chewing on a burger, he decided he was done...

"If I see somebody who is throwing their life away with both hands and is raging around and destroying their family, I can't understand that person," he said. "I'm not in that sphere of activity anymore, and I don't understand it any more than I understood 10 or 20 years ago that somehow everything was going to turn out O.K. from this lousy, exotic and dark triple chapter of my life. I swear to God I don’t even really understand that planet anymore."

Mr. Downey, who has said that he woke up in a pool of his own blood a time or two when he was in prison, is a fighter. "Probably the biggest thing that Tony Stark and I have in common is the hardware of conflict, the courage under fire," he said, setting aside his lunch on a tray. "I don't really fit in so good outside the military bases with my mentality."

So the reporter asked him about this stuff, and getting clean -- fair questions, I think -- but Downey didn't want to talk about it and just wanted to promote the Avengers. Which is also fair enough. And then he walked.

What are his politics, anyway? This site says he both attended a fundraiser for Barack Obama in 2012, perhaps just at the behest of George Clooney, but also attended the Republican National Convention in 2008.

What he might be doing is trying to remain in the closet, or even go back into it, having come out before.

You just aren't allowed to be anything but Progressive Democrat in this country anymore.

* I realized that I was ready to take RDJr's side against the reporter, before watching the clip, and that this is just this sad habit that everyone is now in of feeling the need to immediately declare Tribal Allegiance.

In reality, nothing bad happened here: The reporter asked questions Downey didn't want to answer, and Downey decided not to answer. No one's objectively right: The reporter wanted him to talk about it, Downey didn't want to talk about it. Neither's wrong; both simply had different agendas.

But our current Dumb Age requires that every single dispute, like this one, have some kind of Black Hat Villain and White Hat Hero.

posted by Ace at 04:39 PM

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