Robert Downey Jr. names the two most important movies in his career, and Iron Man isn’t on the list

Robert Downey Jr. is undeniably one of the most important movie stars of the past few decades, if not all time (depending on how you want to weigh the importance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe), but if you ask the man himself about the biggest milestones in his own career—as The New York Times Magazine did recently—then he’ll have a surprising answer for you. According to Downey, there are two films he considers the “most important” of the past 25 years of his acting career (which is to say, since he got cleaned up after years of struggling with drug abuse), and they are The Shaggy Dog and Dolittle. Not Iron Man, not… seriously, not Iron Man.

But Downey has a pretty good justification for why he chose those two, explaining that The Shaggy Dog—the 2006 movie where Tim Allen gets turned into a dog—was the project that convinced Disney that they could trust Downey enough to insure him, making a little movie called Iron Man possible (seems like a cheat, but we’ll allow it). As for Dolittle, the infamous 2020 flop was the first movie he made after Tony Stark died in Avengers: Endgame, and the first time he had played anyone but Tony Stark since 2014’s The Judge.

Downey says Dolittle was “a two-and-a-half-year wound of squandered opportunity,” crediting his wife, producing partner Susan Downey, with even making it “serviceable enough” to release. But, he says, the failure of that movie convinced him and his wife to go through a “reset of priorities” and reexamine who their “closest business advisors were,” and since Downey was dealing with that while his father—independent filmmaker Robert Downey Sr.—was on his deathbed, it also motivated him to make Sr., a documentary about his father that Downey says is “the most important thing” he’ll ever do.

Curiously, though, bringing up Sr. in the New York Times Magazine profile also caused Downey to bring up this idea of some movies being “content” and some not. In his mind, Sr. is “content” because even though it was “so personal” to him, it’s still just something that a viewer “could have chosen to click on and watch or not.” Prompted for examples by the interviewer, who seemed to be angling for a hot take from him, Downey said that Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows and Back To School were “not content,” but Avengers: Age Of Ultron was.

But before you take that as him criticizing the MCU, his explanation actually seems to be that thinking of something as “content” is a way to distance himself from how other people might feel about it, saying that just because it might be “the most important thing” he’s ever done, that doesn’t mean it will matter at all to someone else. So he doesn’t care how people feel about Sr. or Age Of Ultron, possibly for different reasons, but he apparently does care how people feel about Back To School and Game Of Shadows (which may explain why he insists on making more, but also those movies are cool).

Downey has a lot of other galaxy brain thoughts in the New York Times Magazine piece, so give it a look if you’re curious how a guy who has played the same character for decades is approaching the challenge of being in a Christopher Nolan movie next.