Robert Downey Jr. has said that he does not agree with Chris Hemsworth’s critique of his performance in Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder.
The 2022 film was the fourth instalment in the MCU that focused primarily on Hemsworth’s character, and in a new interview, the Australian has said that he feels like he became “a parody” of himself in the film, and that he “didn’t stick the landing”.
“Sometimes I felt like a security guard for the team,” he added. “I would read everyone else’s lines, and go, ‘Oh, they got way cooler stuff. They’re having more fun. What’s my character doing?’”
Downey responded to Hemsworth’s comments in the same interview with Vanity Fair, explaining that he believes that Thor contained the “most complex psyche” of any of the central Avengers characters.
“First off, Thor as a character was super tricky to adapt—lots of implied limitations—but he and Ken Branagh figured out how to transcend, make him somehow relatable but godlike,” he said.
“Hemsworth is, in my opinion, the most complex psyche out of all us Avengers. He’s got wit and gravitas, but also such restraint, fire, and gentleness.”
Downey recently described his Oscar-winning turn in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer as being like “picking fly shit out of pepper”.
Back in March, Downey Jr. won his first Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role of the manipulative government official Lewis Strauss in the film.
“I knew that playing Strauss, in Oppenheimer, was going to be like picking fly shit out of pepper — that it was going to be extremely exacting, that it was going to be … not confining, but liberating by its varied implicit limitations of what my usual toolbox is.”
Jodie Foster recently revealed that she was concerned for Downey’s health while she directed him in the 1995 film Home For The Holidays.
She recalled that she “took him to one side” before saying: “Look, I couldn’t be more grateful for what you’ve given in this film. But I’m scared of what happens to you next.”
“Right now you are incredibly good at balancing on the barstool. But it’s really precarious, and I’m not sure how that’s going to end.”
The Iron Man star also recently revealed that he would return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, should the opportunity arise.