Superhero return? Robert Downey Jr. isn’t completely ruling out a return as Tony Stark in another Iron Man film someday.
“Those might be the stages of grief,” Downey, 54, told Today show’s Hoda Kotb on Wednesday, January 15, when talking about fans rooting for his return to the Iron Man franchise.
When asked if he was open to reprise his role in a future Marvel film, the New York native didn’t say no.
“I am so pleased that I wound up where I have. I am very fortunate,” he told Kotb, 55. “I’m not the kind of guy — I want to try to keep it classy. We’ll see.”
Fans might be going through their own heartbreak about Downey no longer being the man behind the red suit — he played the superhero for the last time in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame — but he’s more accepting of his exit.
“Now that I’m middle-aged, to be honest, you start looking at the back nine and you go, ‘This is part of the journey,’” he admitted. “Things end and everyone is going somewhere.”
He might be done playing Iron Man on screen for now, but that doesn’t mean that the Sherlock Holmes actor doesn’t still love the character and fans who have supported him over the years.
While guest-hosting The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Tuesday, January 14, Downey met a family, Nicole and Andy Arambula and their son, Vincent Arambula, who is autistic.
The couple revealed that their son, 10, lost the ability to speak at the age of 1. By the time Vincent was 4, he had been diagnosed with autism.
When Vincent was 6 years old he got an Iron Man helmet that helped him to communicate and “talk and [work on] imagination play.”
“The mask grounded him and allowed him to feel confident,” Andy told Downey, who was filling in for Ellen DeGeneres. “Within 24 hours we saw a different child.”
Vincent added: “It helped me talk. It helped me hide my identity from the world.”
The Dolittle actor was touched by the family’s story, explaining that “it makes all these last years of working on [Iron Man] worthwhile.”
