After being nominated for an Academy Award for his role in Oppenheimer, Robert Downey Jr. is reflecting on losing his first Oscar nomination.
The Avengers franchise star, 58, was nominated for Best Actor for Chaplin in 1992 and lost to Al Pacino, who won for his role in Scent of a Woman. Downey Jr. was 28 at the time, and struggled with a drug addiction.
“I was young and crazy,” Downey Jr. said during an interview on The View on Wednesday, January 24.
He told cohost Joy Behar that winning “would have put me under the impression that I was on the right track.”
He turned to cohost Whoopi Goldberg, who starred with the actor in the 1991 comedy Soapdish, and said, “Whoopi remembers.”
Goldberg, 68, responded, “We were on those tracks together.”
The Sister Act star has been very open about her substance problems in the past, admitting in a February 2011 episode of The View, “I was a functioning drug addict.”
Downey Jr. was arrested and jailed multiple times over drug-related charges in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In 1996, he was stopped by police after driving naked down Sunset Boulevard, and was found in possession of cocaine, heroin and a gun.
Later that year, Downey Jr. pleaded no contest to possession of cocaine, driving under the influence, carrying a concealed weapon in a vehicle with a prior conviction and being under the influence of heroin.
During a court appearance in 1999, he described his addiction as “like I’ve got a shotgun in my mouth, with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal.”
Following parole violations, Downey Jr. was sentenced in 1999 to three years of prison. He served a total of 15 months.
In 2015, then California Governor Jerry Brown pardoned his drug and weapons offenses. The pardon read, “Since his release from custody he has lived an honest and upright life, exhibited good moral character and conducted himself as a law-abiding citizen.”
After being released from prison, Downey Jr. has turned his life around, and has been sober since 2002.
In 2008, he began a major comeback in his career as the star of Iron Man, and has appeared as Tony Stark in several Marvel Cinematic Universe films.
At the Avengers: Infinity War world premiere in 2018, Downey told the audience that he faced sobriety issues for three decades.
“The past for me was 30 years of dependency, depravity, and despair,” he said.
Earlier this week, Downey Jr. was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor for his role as U.S. Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer. The film received 13 nominations, the most for any movie this year, including Best Picture and Best Director for Christopher Nolan.
“Waking up to all of these nominations for Christopher Nolan and his many talented collaborators is an absolute delight,” Downey Jr. said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly on Tuesday. “It’s been the honor of a lifetime to be part of the cinematic masterpiece that is Oppenheimer, and it’s a privilege to be an Academy member nominated alongside such esteemed company.”
This is Downey Jr.’s Oscar third nomination. He was also up for Best Supporting Actor in 2009 for Tropic Thunder. He lost to The Dark Knight star Heath Ledger.
