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Back in 1994, audiences witnessed arguably Robert Downey Jr.’s most engaging film and role of the entire decade, with respects to Chaplin, in the form of Oliver Stone’s wildly chaotic mass-murder romance Natural Born Killers. Downey’s enjoyably over-the-top performance as tabloid TV journalist Wayne Gale is on par with the film itself, and he’s spoken up about just how blitzed he’d get during the production.
Technically, the Natural Born Killers oral history from Esquire goes into detail about quite a few cast members being under one influence or another during the production. But it’s the future MCU Doctor Doom who seemingly put himself in the roughest positions when it came to getting the job done.
The Oscar-winning actor talked candidly about a worst-case, anti-FOMO scenario that formed when his decision to get ripped colldied with a filming schedule shift for the big prison interview that led to the deadly riot. As Downey put it:
The day that we did the prison interview, I had been out on the town, nine sheets to the wind. And then everything on the schedule got moved up, and suddenly I needed to be there in two hours. To this day, it was one of the most mortifying notifications I’ve ever received, because it was a seven-page scene. I got to set and I was absolutely useless. I was then given a therapeutic injection of ‘B12 vitamins’—I’m just going to put that in quotes, italics, underlined, and question marks on either side. I have never in my life experienced a more delightful nine hours.
Without going into too much speculation about what might have been included in that “vitamin” booster that he was given, I can attest as a viewer that it did the trick. Especially as a younger viewer first watching Natural Born Killers in the ’90s, I never would have guessed that the prison interview was such a miserable experience for RDJ. Whatever ups and downs his sobriety took during that shoot, it all fits amazingly well within Stone’s madcap reality. (Who knows how it would have fared with Quentin Tarantino’s fued-sparking original screenplay still intact?)
It speaks to Robert Downey Jr.’s professionalism that the production didn’t have to trash that entire day of filming the way that things may have gone for other actors in that position. He continued his reflection by pointing how prepared he already was going into that scene, even if everything happened hours earlier than expected.
But! I looked at the pages left to right, spread out on the floor—only twice—and was off-book. And—it’s the only time this happened during that shoot: You know how sometimes there’s applause from the crew after takes when people are doing movies and really nail it? When I finally got through that day—and Woody nailed it, nailed it, nailed it—then they had to turn around on me. The entire crew applauded because I think intuitively they know that I should not have even been anywhere but an emergency room that morning.
I can imagine how stressful it might have been for the cast and crew that day, not quite knowing how things would go with Downey, and then hitting that endpoint (presumably) without any outright disasters happening. It might still be worth applauding in some of their minds.
For all that it turned out to be a success, though, I will still happily go the rest of my life without having a similar experience if possible. So I guess it’s a “good” thing I don’t have any big Hollywood movies coming with Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis? Wait, maybe there is a bit of FOMO for me to gnaw on….
To rewatch Downey’s performance, or to see it for the first time, Natural Born Killers can be streamed now with a Netflix subscription, and for those who enjoy Oliver Stone‘s darker instincts, read why you should watchThe Hand, his 1981 horror film co-starring Michael Caine and Andrea Marcovicci.