FROM ZERO TO SUPERHERO

Most fans know how Robert Downey Jnr overcame his demons to become the world’s highest-paid actor. Far less well known is the role his drug-addict father played in sending him off the rails

- TOM LEONARD

HE WAS only six when he took the first step on his chaotic path to drug addiction and prison. 

Robert Downey Jnr took a sip of white wine at his family home in New York. His father caught him, but instead of extracting the glass from his young son’s hands, he passed him a cannabis joint and told him to puff on that instead. Such was cult filmmaker Robert Downey Snr’s unorthodox approach to childcare. Far less well known than his Hollywood- star son, who eventually overcame his demons to become the world’s highest-paid actor, Downey Snr was a maverick director who was also a hopeless drug addict for much of his life. 

Years later, he admitted he’d made “a terrible, stupid mistake” in giving his six-year-old son drugs. 

However, as a new documentary that’s been three years in the making reveals, it was in keeping with a chaotic and irresponsible parenting style. 

When he wasn’t handing his son narcotics, Downey Snr was taking little Robert off to watch X-rated films and casting him, from the age of five in his own disturbing movies. Home life involved “growing up in a family where everyone was doing drugs”, according to Robert.  

Is it any wonder that the future Iron Man star went off the rails so spectacularly? He puts that very question to his ailing father in a new Netflix documentary, Sr., that he’s made about his turbulent relationship with his dad and his bizarre upbringing. 

The film throws a revealing new light on a deeply troubled but self-assured actor who in 1999 told a judge that thanks to his father giving drugs to him he’d been hooked since the age of eight.