Robert Downey Jr.‘s meta Method acting may have been a little too…Method-ly…on “Tropic Thunder.”
His co-star Danny McBride told GQ (video below) how the recent Oscar winner stayed in character throughout production of the 2008 comedy. And we do mean throughout production. Downey, who played an egomaniac Method actor who donned Blackface in the satirical film about the making of a war movie, would even “piss in character,” McBride said.
Perhaps that earned him his 2009 Best Supporting Actor Academy-Award nomination. (He didn’t win; Heath Ledger did posthumously for “The Dark Knight.”)
McBride, who played an explosives director on set, recalled being up in a watchtower and still hearing Downey in his earpiece talking to himself even on the way to the restroom.
“I guess during one of the takes they had left Downey’s mic on and so I’m sitting up there and I’m like, ‘Oh shit, I can hear what he’s saying,’” McBride said. “He was talking to people and he was in character the whole time. And then I even watched him walk back to his trailer and saw it from down there and he was talking to himself.”
McBride said Downey was singing “‘I’m going to go drain the snake, I’m going to go drain the snake’” while walking to the toilets.
“He made up a song about how was going to go piss — in character — for no one else’s benefit except for his own,” McBride said with a laugh.
“Tropic Thunder” was directed by Ben Stiller, who also starred in the feature as an action star who gets kidnapped by actual drug lords while on location for the “Apocalypse Now”-esque war film. McBride shared that Stiller took the meta meta meta-ness to another level by even including real studio notes as dialogue for Bill Hader’s studio executive character.
“Even just the way he would handle the studio was pretty funny. It’s like, they would give dailies back each day and I remember the studio would give him notes like, ‘We need more wide shots,’ or, ‘This needs to be funnier, it’s too dark,’” McBride said. “And Ben would just take those notes and then give them to Bill Hader’s character to just say in the movie and be mocked and ridiculed. And then I think the notes slowed down after that.”
