High minimum-security.īut this was Robert Downey Jr., meaning that the time in stir was, for him, more productive than 10 semesters with Strasberg. After a succession of arrests (getting wasted, getting busted, ditching rehab), he’d been sent to the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison, in Corcoran, California. He was a convict, or, to quote Hank Williams, a number, not a name.
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For a while back there, in case you weren’t paying attention, he wasn’t a movie star. Utterly and completely.”ĭowney, 49, in sunglasses and baseball hat, oblivious to the look that registers on the face of each driver he leaves behind-son of a bitch, I’ve just been dusted by Iron Man!-is behaving like a movie star. I won’t say it made me want to be an actor, but that ride did change my life. “I had a little Honda scooter in Salina, a tiny thing, not even a motorcycle, because I wasn’t old enough to drive, and one day, a girl in the movie, Stacey Nelkin, a natural beauty with an unbelievable rack, asked me to ride her from the set back to the hotel where we were staying, and she got behind me, and snuggled up and pressed against me the whole way. “Salina, Kansas, that’s where we were shooting,” says Jr., lingering on the word “Salina,” with its resonance of an older, purer America. He’s talking about a special afternoon, years ago, during the filming of Up the Academy, a classic bit of late-70s raunch directed by his father, Robert Downey Sr. I’m shotgun with Robert Downey Jr., the world’s highest-paid actor, strapped in the passenger seat of his black ‘65 Corvette, which, top down, flashes through the sparse weekday traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, Point Dume jutting into the sea. Every now and then, you just need to ride.