The Director’s Guild stage is usually where veteran contenders show up polished and careful. However, when Robert Downey Jr. gets locked in, he really amps up a room. So, when the Academy Award-winning “Oppenheimer” actor turned up at a recent awards-season Q&A to have a conversation with Oscar-nominated Timothée Chalamet about his new film “Marty Supreme,” RDJ was effusive, over the moon and sounded like he’d just taken a body blow from a movie.
Describing the film as “mind-blowing,” Downey rewound the tape to the first time he clocked Chalamet’s velocity—then jumped straight into what he’d just seen. “I saw this movie, and I’m flashing back to when you were 22,” Downey said, referencing Chalamet’s breakthrough film, “Call Me By Your Name, “and remarking on the actor’s artistic leaps and bounds. “And then just a year ago, ‘A Complete Unknown,’ and I [thing] ‘My God, this guy is technically so evolved.’ And I saw this movie and… I’m astonished.”
Downey kept pressing the point that it wasn’t just an outstanding performance inside a movie — it was the kind of film that holds together as a complete object.
“This is mind-blowing,” he enthused. “And also, just because it’s just such a great film. Any one of us can say, you know, that the worst review you ever want to get is, ‘He’s the best thing in the movie.’ It’s that you’re so exceptionally good [in] the film. I mean, this is a real piece of art.”
Chalamet returned the compliment and admitted that Downey’s first Academy Award nomination for “Chaplin” was a big influence on how he approached last year’s Bob Dylan film.
For ‘A Complete Unknown,’ ‘Chaplin’ was one of the things I looked at,” he admitted. And I went, ‘Wow, okay, somebody very recognizable as an actor, as Robert Downey Jr. shapeshifted into another person. [Your performance] gave me confidence approaching the Bob Dylan role.”
Later, Downey went even bigger, crediting the whole machine around Chalamet and then dropping the kind of sweeping, stop-you-cold praise that doesn’t sound like awards-season small talk. “Everybody did their job across the board, [but] to me, this is a decade-defining film, and I think it is a generation-defining performance,” he admitted.
Chalamet took the compliment and turned it back toward the film, his director, Josh Safdie, but also an acting teacher who taught him to “dream big,” much like the “Marty Supreme” ethos. His acting teacher, Howard Shipman, warned him that “raw talent isn’t mastery…but it gave me a sort of thing to chase.”
As for his director, Chalamet said, “Josh is just a master. I really believe in [his film] and hugely. [The crew were] like a bunch of hungry artists coming together and giving it their all.”
Downey saved one last personal story for the send-off: a memory of being thirty, and cocky af, believing he was already “one of the greats,” and then having the audacity to ask legendary filmmaker Norman Jewison, then directing him in “Only You,” opposite Marisa Tomei, if he agreed.
Jewison snapped him back to reality. Then Downey turned it into a verdict, delivered to Chalamet in the present tense. “He looked at me like I was nuts. And he said, ‘Mr. Downey, that remains to be seen.’” Downey recalled, remembering what Jewison said back to him before adding, “And I want to say in front of God and everyone in this audience here, for you, that as of ‘Marty Supreme,’ it no longer remains to be seen.”
Watch the whole conversation below.
