Robert Downey Jr. has some thoughts about the real-life tech tycoon his Marvel character Iron Man is most often compared to. And he’s not particularly gung-ho about Elon Musk “cosplaying” as the character.
“I’ve only met him a few times,” Downey Jr. said of Musk during a sit down on New York Magazine’s On With Kara Swisher podcast that aired Monday, but “I just wish that he would control his behavior a little more.”
Downey Jr.’s comments came in response to Swisher’s remark that Musk had been “cosplaying” as Iron Man’s alter-ego Tony Stark. Jon Favreau, director of the first two Iron Man movies revealed that Musk influenced the character during a 2016 episode of the Recode Decode podcast, also hosted by Swisher, and that Downey Jr. and the CEO spent time together to “give us some insight into what it’d really be like to be Tony Stark.”
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Musk has been a “very good friend of the Marvel family,” Favreau said on Recode, allowing the director to shoot part of Iron Man 2 at SpaceX and also walking on for a cameo.
Though Favreau explained that Iron Man is “not based on [Musk], it’s based on the comic book,” Musk was often touted as the closest real-life person to the Stark character.
Iron Man screenwriter Mark Fergus noted Stark is a combo of “[Musk], Trump [‘before he became president’], and maybe a little Steve Jobs.”
But now that Musk has taken to platforming misinformation and using his money and ownership of X/Twitter to interfere in the presidential election, connecting the mogul to Iron Man has become problematic for fans—and perhaps to some extent, Downey Jr. too.
“This idea of ‘It’s all okay ‘cause we’ve gotta get to Mars’ doesn’t really hold water with me,” Downey Jr. continued on the podcast, referring to Musk and his company SpaceX’s endeavor to “colonize Mars.”
Downey Jr. got a taste of Musk’s waned favorability in August when he called Jon Favreau the “Elon Musk of cinema” on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, which he’d meant as a compliment since Favreau is a “tech friendly guy”—but groans emerged across the internet over the comparison.
And yet, the Oscar-winning actor didn’t write Musk off entirely in his remarks.
“You have to look at all that [Musk has] done that demonstrates why he’s valuable,” he continued. “Nowadays separating the individual from their behavior is a tough thing to do because hell is other people—and that has been hijacked in this information age, to divide us rather than allow for discourse, debate, and dialogue.”
