Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Robert Downey Jr.

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

Robert Downey Jr. is an actor and producer whose critically acclaimed performance as Lewis Strauss in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer earned him an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA Award. His newest project, The Sympathizer, an HBO miniseries based on the 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, has Downey Jr. taking on multiple roles simultaneously. Born into a family of filmmakers, Downey Jr. began acting as a child actor in his father's independent films, then entered mainstream Hollywood in the 1980s. His portrayal of the legendary Charlie Chaplin in the 1992 biopic Chaplin earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. After a period of personal struggles with substance abuse, Downey conquered his addiction, dedicated himself to sobriety, and made a remarkable professional resurgence. His starring roles as Tony Stark/Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in the action-adventure Sherlock Holmes, and in the action comedy Tropic Thunder catapulted him to global stardom. To date, Downey has appeared in over 70 movies, which have grossed over $14 billion, making Downey one of the highest-grossing actors of all time.  ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Lucy https://lucy.co/tetra ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra

Tetragrammaton. I I wound up like squatting in a friend's garage in the Venice canals and my dad was like, I forgot to leave LA. I thought I came here to do a rewrite, I forgot to leave, I'm going back to New York. And I was so incensed because dad said, you want to come or you want to stay? And I was like, how old do you think you were? 15, 16. Was that the nature of your relationship with your dad?

Not the nature of, but this is 1980. Yeah. So it was like, dude, I'm still a minor. And you're wondering if I want to stay in LA alone or go back with one of my, so. Were your parents together at that time or no? No, as a matter of fact, I'd been with my mom in New York when they broke up.

I came out to LA where my dad was and I go, this is amazing. I'm going to Lincoln Junior High School, I'm meeting gorgeous, cool California chicks, driving Fiat 124 Spider stick shift and smoking Clove cigarettes and I'm going like, I'm never going back to New York. And after I dropped out of Sammose,

so I might have been almost 17, actually, sorry. And senior had had it with LA, he was gonna go back to New York. And he hits me with that, I'm split, you wanna come? And I thought, so I just said, and this is very East Coast too, right? I said, I'm split and you want to come? And so I just said, and this is very East Coast too, right? I said, I'm good.

And I just wound up calling up one of my friends and thankfully their dad was like, what? Okay, well, you know, we're in the Venice canals and we have a garage. I was like, and there's a couch. I was like, great, I'm set. And so on a resentment, I stayed out here. Then I went back to New York.

Also you wanted to stay. You know what? The life was here. Dude, you know what? Thank you for saying that. I'm listening to what you're saying and you're telling me it was a dream being here. Yes.

Yes. Yes? Correct. Yeah. Nonetheless, and I think as we both know, if you're a New Yorker, Yes. Yes? Correct. Yeah. Nonetheless, and I think as we both know, if you're a New Yorker, if you're born there in that time zone, it's where you're going to have to start.

No matter where you think you'd rather start, you're gonna have to go back there in some way, shape, or form. So I did go back and I started doing regional theater, off-Broadway theater, musical theater, and then I got a call one morning when I was damn near destitute in a tiny little open studio apartment

in Hell's Kitchen saying, there's this movie called Tough Turf, Jimmy Spader's the star, Craig Sheffer bowed out of it, he got a better job with Emilio doing some other job. And I was like, yes. And I came back to California kind of triumphant, or so I thought, because now I was able to come back with a job.

Yeah. Tell me about theater in New York, what was that like? Did you like it? I loved it. Upstate New York, the Jiva Theater in Rochester, did a play called Alms for the Middle Class about some kid who runs away from home, changes his name to Red Antelope, and his father comes to try to get him with Bill Pullman,

believe it or not. And I did, the first thing I did was a play called Fraternity about SMU, the Texas university, and the kind of swan song of these guys who were all in a fraternity together. And then after that, and after almost the middle class, regional theater, I got cast in what I thought was gonna be my breakout role,

a musical directed by Pat Burch, who was the choreographer for Grease and directed Grease 2, called American Passion. And it was about a bunch of kids calling into a radio station. The actual voice was this guy Roscoe, who I think was from KTU, and we're trying to get a chance to go meet this band,

I think called American Passion. And it was a musical. And it closed opening night at the Joyce Theater in New York. Wow. Wild. How different is it performing in front of an audience than for a camera? in New York. Wow. Wild. How different is it performing in front of an audience

than for a camera? Not particularly, but I had wrongly, and have, until a month or two ago, for the last 40 years, thought that theater was just a platform to get into movies and or on screen nowadays. And now 40 years later, I'm gonna go back and do theater for the first time in 40 years.

Yeah. It's gotta be good. It fucking better be. It's gotta be. But same thing for you. I'm saying it's gotta be for you to have that experience on a nightly basis and feel that connection

because you don't get to feel that doing it with a camera. It's a different thing. Yeah. I think it's gonna be good. Thanks, Son. And I think too, they've always said that film is a director's medium, TV is a writer's medium, theater is an actor's medium.

Sounds good. How did you learn your craft to be able to get those gigs even at that young age? I even remember being in grade school somewhere like upstate New York or Connecticut. Family moved around a lot where I'd taken out one of those little wooden kind of stick weights that you put the bottom of like a pole blind.

And I'd wrapped it in black electrical tape and made a sword out of it. And I remember saying, yield the castle now, Lady Roxanne. Like we were doing some dumb thing literally inside a classroom. Like I went out in the hall to make my entrance into the classroom when I was maybe nine. And my dad was a filmmaker, so he was throwing us in these experimental films he was doing, or his less than experimental kind of, you know, non-mainstream films that were funded and had distribution and all that.

And so I was game bread to do something like that. It's amazing. Do you think of yourself as a sensitive person? Oh my God, dude. No, I like to think of myself as a kid who was a latchkey kid in Manhattan, four sales and then down to University Place and then all around the city in the mid-70s.

And I like to think that I had built up this tough, like rhino leather exterior, because in a way I think we did. I think any of us who were from that time did. Just to survive and exist out in that world. Yeah, and like you have know, you have those crazy, rude awakenings, you have those lessons where you're like, whoa, don't go to Alphabet City right now.

But I think the artist was trying to express that softer, mushy inside, which was probably, honestly, what sustained me through all the insanity anyway. Tell me about Win Chun. Oh. I don't know where to start except to say that it has been the truest apprenticeship in my life.

And I believe that we're in a bit of a lack for true apprenticeships nowadays. Oftentimes you'll see folks, and I credit them for it because it's good work if you can get it, they'd rather work at five companies over three years than one company for three or five years sometimes. And right before I was getting up in my late 30s, and a lot of things were about to change,

including finally really truly getting sober, and I met Eric Oram, who would wind up being my Sifu, and I just internally kind of committed to a lifelong apprenticeship with this guy. Did you know right away? Right away. That's amazing. Tell me about that.

What was the feeling? The feeling was, you know, we all grew up, I think, watching and being influenced by the Hong Kong kung fu films, obviously Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Benny the Jet, but they were almost like comic book legends that were real, and then you realize that unlike other forms of martial arts or even boxing, my dad was a huge boxing buff. Used to take me to the felt forum and we'd be like splattered in blood in the second row. So initially I had a distaste for it, but when I realized that there are systems that are

more rooted in tradition, like this comes out of the Shaolin temple from the 18th century, developed by a female Buddhist nun, and that it was all about how to deal with multiple opponents, people who were more fit, stronger, better armed than you. As a New Yorker, remembering that kid with the soft center with the tough exterior, it just felt like I was meant to learn this craft. And it also wound up more than anything being an amazing brain healing and brain training tool. Tell me about the actual craft of it. I don't know anything about it. How is it different than other martial arts? It is extremely difficult to build and wildly easy to use. And if you ever just Google martial arts in order, it gets very good rankings at its essence.

It's also very misunderstood because not unlike aspects of Chinese culture, it's always secrets and traditions and things that are bespoke and this is for the masses. But I was really fortunate to get to the very heart of it where my sifu, sifu was Bruce Lee's instructor because Ip Man wasn't actually instructing at that point. And Ip Man had even instructed Grandmaster Chung, William Chung, to not even let Bruce know what the traditional real Wing Chun stuff was, because he was going to bring it to the West, and that was very frowned upon, and there's a long litany of stories, articles, and still people

who were around back then. But anyway, the basic tenets of it are that you never fight force with force, that you use two hands at the same time always. So rather than jab, defend, jab, cross, he punches, you punch, we both punch at the same time. It's all these coordinated movements. It's what Neo is doing with one hand at the end

of the first matrix is entirely Wing Chun. And I also love the Matrix. So I have to thank the Wachowskis for, in culture, introducing me to something that I think we all already knew because it's what Bruce is doing in Enter the Dragon when they're touching hands and then he climbs up. So anyway, then it just wound up coming in really handy doing films like Sherlock Holmes or... the dragon when they're touching hands and then he climbs up. So anyway, then it just wound up coming in really handy

doing films like Sherlock Holmes or. How did you come to it? Like how did you find your master? Dude, I was driving by Lincoln and Pico by my old high school, San Monica High School, where I basically dropped out of. And I kept driving by this academy, wasn't sober yet. And I kept driving by this academy, wasn't sober yet. And I kept driving by this academy

and having this intuition. I was like, man, I should get into a martial art, which was a crazy thought. This was 20 plus years ago. It's been outside of my family, my community, and my day job as an entertainer, it's been the great passion of my life. Do you think of yourself as an entertainer?

Shouldn't we? Here's what I'll say. No rule, I'm asking you how you do it. Here's what I would say, I would qualify us as we are in a service industry. The service we provide is entertainment. And by entertainment, I don't want to make it, I don't want to be too reductive or marginalize it because entertainment is actually encompasses so much because it can elevate and transport

and be descriptive. So you got to use Wynchun in Sherlock. Sure. Amazing. And do you practice it daily? Is it something that you practice daily? Yes, I was at a conference yesterday and the only two people in the gym at 7.30 in the morning

up in Santa Barbara were me and Kevin Hart. He does it as well. No, Kevin Hart was lifting weights and doing pull-ups and running super like interval training, like bananas. And I was doing kicking and trapping drills and punching drills and footwork and all that stuff. It has affected me, and I'm sure you have your own experiences like this,

where it's a thing that's made my whiskers longer. Right, yeah. Whether it's meditation or a thing that's made my whiskers longer. I know whether it's Meditation or certain kinds of movement. I'm sure that those who are fortunate enough to be natural water folk They understand it because you're never fighting force with force. You're always using multiple limbs at the same time if you can You're always guarding your center because you don't want to hit anything under the water

and you certainly don't want even the softest of boards to crown you. So there's all these, it's like balancing three bowling balls at all times internally. So you've been playing with it for close to 30 years? 20. 20. Yeah, just coming up on 20.

It's funny you said 30. Yeah. This morning, I was on with one of my favorite journalists, Ryan D'Agostino, talking about the 30th anniversary of natural born killers. Wow. That's unbelievable. Yes.

By the way, do you remember? I remember going to the theater to see it. It's weird that it was that long ago. Yeah. I must digress. Yes. By the way, do we have- I remember going to the theater to see it. Okay. It's weird that it was that long ago. Yeah. I must digress. Yeah. The Less Than Zero soundtrack has come back around for some reason.

So many people recently have said to me, I'm watching that movie and it really holds up. And of course we know all the behind the scenes stories of all the acrimony and the director and the producers and the producers and this and that. But the fact that that soundtrack ends and the movie ends with Roy Orbison

was so ahead of its time. But really the whole soundtrack is pretty great. And you were the supervisor on that film. Did it get away from you? Did you feel that it ultimately was the expression you wanted? I've just never even been able to. I got to make the album exactly the way I wanted it. Wow.

I remember going to Fox, who was the studio. They were in the studio, yeah. And they showed me the artwork for their movie poster, and it was terrible. And I said, well, I'm not gonna put that on my album cover. I won't have that. And I showed them what I would use as the album cover, which was what the album cover was,

and then they decided to make my album cover the movie poster. Whoa, dude. Was it Julian kind of splayed out with his foot in his hand in that flower shirt? And I think it looked like maybe next to a pool. Yes, dude. And it looked like a frame from a movie.

I decided this is the image that represents the story. I had no idea. See, I knew I asked for a movie. I decided this is the image that represents the story. I had no idea. See, I knew I asked for a reason. Yeah, that's how the universe seems to work. It's like you'll have a thought, ask a strange question, get a strange answer, tying the threads up. It's like we're being assisted through all this. Boy, if we aren't, it's patently obvious.

It's amazing, isn't it? Do you have those experiences regularly where you're just like, how is this happening? Yes, well, here's what I know. When I'm in flow, whatever that means, and that's overrated right now, when the Tao is in progress, there's a majesty to it.

It's so obvious that it can be elusive. And then it's funny when you almost take it for granted. Yes, complete quantum magic is occurring. And you go, yeah, because you've had enough experiences where you go, oh, there's no hundred miracles in a row that could have happened that would have led to this moment of synchronicity. As you know so well, it's your credo, it's the book, it's crazy how everything is like everything else because I can draw every comparison in the creative act to this fortunate journey I've been on.

When you read it, did you feel like this is my experience of the world? in the creative act to this fortunate journey I've been on. When you read it, did you feel like this is my experience of the world? Yes, and even more so I felt like, the funny thing is it's so accessible and yet somebody nowadays still needs to put it down in black and white, but more importantly is the symbol. You are in the center of the circle now

with every waking, breathing moment. The present is the only point of power. And how can we act in accord with the highest good, but also how do you stay in grace when we're so flawed and so prone to attaching our neurosis to things. You know? And there's so much kind of garbage flying by. That's another part that keep in mind.

Yes. We're not always in the garden. No. And by the way, you know, not being in the garden in my other side of my day job is just, you know, I almost never talk about this, but in the recovery world, there's you're in the garden or you're in the barrel. And the barrel is a very highly esteemed place

to be. Because when you're not in the garden and you're not with grace, how do we sustain ourselves until we're granted by self or by circumstance or by cosmology or by the next moment of God's grace permitted again to the garden. Yeah. The barrel is no joke. It has been cherished in tribal wisdom traditions for thousands of years. Indigenous peoples all over the world have used this plant-based compound in spiritual, healing and ceremonial rites and rituals for centuries. More recently it has been shown to increase alertness, improve focus, elevate mood, enhance cognition, heighten reward sensation, and more. We are talking about nicotine.

Nicotine is a wonder worker. Inspired by indigenous practices throughout history and guided by a wealth of contemporary research, the team at Lucy set out on a mission to create clean, brain-boosting nicotine products for the modern lifestyle. Whether it's their nicotine breakers, parches or gum, Lucy's products are carefully formulated to deliver a pure and potent nicotine experience, free from the undesirable aspects of cigarette smoke. Backed by rigorous research, nicotine is known to amplify cognitive processes, emotional regulation, and modulate the release of neurotransmitters like

dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine. Experience the power of this natural nootropic by visiting lucy.co.uk and discover next level smoke-free nicotine. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. From your early days of Windchun to now, do you feel like it's something that you'll

continue to have new insights into for the rest of your life, or do you feel like, I know how it works now? They used to say that the reason a black belt was black is that your white belt had been in the academy, the dojo, in the studio, in the process long enough for it to have been darkened past the point of being cleaned again. Wow. But the black belt, the black sash in Wing Chun

in and of itself is just the beginning. Because that just means that your apprenticeship has now turned into a place where you've gone from being a CD, which is one of many, to a Siheng, which is an accelerated or senior version within the many, to a Sifu, which is a teacher, to a Sigung, which is a master. So 20 years in, I'm at the halfway mark. I like it. I like a 40-year trajectory. Yeah, it's great.

Something about the consistency, for any practice that holds you, that you can do for a period of time and go on for a long time, it seems like we get so much from these practices. Yeah. Well, it seems like we get so much from these practices. Yeah. Well, it is again that thing of committing

to making yourself small in the presence of all that is. And every time I've fallen out of step, every time I get put in check, every time I gotta get a liver shot from the universe, is when I'm out there on the bleeding edge, almost always unconsciously. I was not consciously deciding to deviate from a healthy interaction with my surroundings.

Something had triggered me, something got my goat, it was a resentment, it was a fear, I was either gonna not get something I wanted, or lose something I had, or get out of balance. I even have one just a couple days ago, I was driving up to this conference and I was going to participate in this musical presentation and I got up there and I realized by the time

I was there for the rehearsal that there was no way that I could do anything except leave this rehearsal. And I don't like being that person. And it wasn't because anybody had done anything wrong. It was because the process had gone past the point communication-wise where what I had signed up for could be utilized. And particularly if you're a celebrity, that people start thinking, oh, he wants to be apologized for because we didn't understand.

I was like, no, no, no, this wasn't an apology thing. It was just, do you ever step into a situation, I'm sure you've had to do it, and you go, oh, this is at a place where the best thing I can do is not engage but bow out, no harm, no foul, and not because the way they do it and the way I do it. It was just things had gone past the point where there could be an interaction. So I always self-judge when that happens, because I wonder, would it happen often?

No. No. Seldom. Which is why when it does, I go, was that my instinct or was that my ego? And then you have to fall back and really, you have to kind of do a post-mortem on it. What just happened then? Because that felt like reverse magnets.

Like I went, it was like, and I just said, oh, I don't need to fight force with force. And I don't need to try to grind my way into a participation. So I backed out, I got in the car, and as we were, by we, I was alone, so who's the we? As I was coming around. There's a bunch of you.

Yeah. As we were all driving in the car, I was alone in. I came up to a stop sign, this is in Santa Barbara. How was the conversation in the car? You know what, I totally said, dude, get off your own back. You're a grown ass man. This wasn't one of those things where I'd put anyone out or that they were gonna have to change much.

I actually realized that the extraction was mathematically very well suited to not affecting the algorithm. In fact, as I was driving away, I was thinking, this is going to go very well. Better than it. Could have done more harm had you stayed. That was driving away, I was thinking, this is going to go very well. Better than it- Could have done more harm had you stayed. That was the one, bro.

Understood. And that's the hardest thing to communicate is, I know this is looking like I'm reneging, but I'm actually trusting myself to say, I just looked at this algorithm, and I'm saying the only problem with this is the integer I. So I'm gonna step away.

As I'm driving and going downy, you gotta get off your own back, trust your gut, trust your gut. I come up to this little stop sign and there's this huge white work truck, looks like one of those apple pickers on top. I've gone about 16 inches over where the stop line is, but this thing is coming much closer

to the side of the road, coming up on me from the left. And I went, and I go, courteous, courteous. I put it in reverse, I back up and smack right into another work truck that was too close to me. Wow. And now I go, you know when we think we're impervious to the unavoidable, I always call it taking one for the team, right?

You break your ankle, something happens, your house burns down. Name the thousand things and I always go, well, not why me, why not me? Isn't it my turn? And I try to, if I ever use magical thinking, it's in those moments. I go, this is good. I get out of the car and I walk right up to these two guys who look, and by the way, the front of their work truck looks like the rear end people three times a week. And I got out of the car, I go, totally my fault.

Front of your truck is fine. Back of my new car is fucked. I love it. Sorry for your trouble. And I get in the fucked. I love it. Sorry if you're in trouble. And I get in the car and I drive away. As I get in the car to drive away, of course the driver of the truck in back of me, that had essentially not rear-ended me,

but not been able to avoid me. I front-ended a truck. Not easy. As I got away, he goes, yeah, could have been a kid between us. And I was like, now we're onto a whole other page. The weird thing is sometimes you extend an olive branch and someone pulls it in and puts a little poo poo on it and hands it back to you.

Which is this odd thing of internal, external boundaries, the exchange, and I'm here to open a door, but I'm not here to be a doormat. And so I shut that off. I was like, dude, he just said what he said, keep driving. And then I got back to where I was going. I think it's also you could look at it as that was verification that you're not supposed to be there anymore. The fact that that was the reaction told you the best thing you could have done was leave.

Okay. So let me build on this, because you must be right. Even making a micro movement back towards that decision is gonna get you in a wreck. Second guessing one's intuition is very dangerous. Yeah, do you ever do it when you're performing? Can you stay in pure, this is what I'm feeling and do it?

I've had that experience, but I'm not as loose, nor am I anywhere near as confident as I have been able to on occasion project. However- That's interesting. I wouldn't have guessed that. Okay. Just from watching, I wouldn't have guessed that. Okay. Just from watching, I wouldn't have guessed it.

It's interesting. But it's the truth. Yeah. I figure too sometimes, I think that it's all a matter of have I swabbed my deck enough to not be dancing on a messy floor, right? Have I cleared the space? How much of the craft is intellectual

and following up on decisions you've made versus something else, some dance in the moment? I mean, of course it always varies from project to project. But again, the funny thing is, I've much more attuned myself to a kind of British external approach to doing things, where at the end of the day, the technical is very important because that's the thing that you can't fix or iterate too much after the fact.

I always believe if I get all the cricket posts set up correctly, it's going to be fun swinging the mallet. And then the mallet of it, which is where do I bring my energy, my quote unquote performance in entertainment in this service industry. I just presuppose that if I've set it up correctly, it's pretty much going to go along the same lines every time. Now you're very consistent from your voice to your history of your interactions, even though iterations and over and over in time,

like you are a Sifu at this point. We're roughly the same age. I would say I am a Sihing en route to Sifu in one journey, and you are a Sifu, and in many people's eyes, a Sigung of certain things. You took some time off, though. I've been working straight through. Yes, I did.

You took a little time away. Never intentionally. You took a little time away, if I recall correctly. Boy, didn't I. Yeah. What would you say have been the big listening musical moments over your life? Is it Gilbert O'Sullivan, Alone Again? Yeah.

I remember that album in the house. I remember the Sesame Street album. I remember my dad would just get a new album, let it bleed and play it until he burned it out. Typically would your dad listen to rock music? Oh yeah. Yeah, and then I remember somehow or other a Artie Shaw album would come through.

And the crazy thing is I can track those early influences. When I was doing regional theater in Rochester, Phil Collins, No Jacket Required had just come out. I was listening to it, driving a bike around in the damn near winter time in Rochester on a Walkman. And I can draw comparisons to those things, all winding up being what culminated and what my taste was. And the Steely Dan Asia album was this moment

of you know when you feel like you found like you had discovered something? Yeah. I felt like I discovered them just when I needed to. And that they had written this album to blow my mind. That's the best. Yeah. What a feeling to feel that connection

from people you don't know. know. They have their own experience. You don't really know what they're talking about in the songs. Not in the slightest. But for some reason, those words mean something to us. Based on our experience, we have our own experience of what they're saying, and something new happens. Of course it's the ultimate, right?

It's unbelievable. Yeah. How much of the craft is physical? Body language, let's say. Well, I think that bringing the body and the mind will follow. I think blocking is the most important thing an actor will do at any point in the day of getting ready to do a scene. I've seen actors whose blocking is so free you just need to unscrew the camera tilt

because you never know where they might go. I've had flashes of that, but I'm a little more plotting in that I like to know the architecture of what it is I'm trying to say with my body. And then less and less over these last couple years, particularly after working with Nolan, I realized what you say is so much less important than how you say it.

And then it reaffirmed what I was believing about, blocking and where I put my body. That's interesting. And that goes to us not understanding the song lyrics. Same idea. Yeah. Tell me about Nolan. What was that experience like? I mean, I just turned 59, right? Same lyrics, same idea. Yeah. Tell me about Nolan.

What was that experience like? I mean, I just turned 59, right? So the fact that I could have some of my most valuable lessons at this point in the game, A, it took a little bit of adjusting to, and also you must always get out of the way because the minute I am closed to counsel, the minute I have contempt prior to investigation, the minute I've decided that I'm not necessarily as teachable as people would like me to be, I'm fucked. But it's a hard lesson to keep coming back to.

So it was old dog new tricks. And he was the vehicle for this. Of course, it helps that it was an astonishingly intuitive story to tell at scale when he told it, because no sooner were we about to start than things went bananas. Yeah, the timing's unbelievable. Yeah.

It was one of those things where, again, like you were saying a few minutes back, oh, okay, so that means that life is doing something and it's assigned us these participation points, if we're willing, and just get on it and start the ride and see where it goes, because something's happening here. And it was a very blessed production,

as far as I could tell. Even the elements conspired. The day of the Trinity test, rather than having to bring in these huge air pushers and these massive fans, it just happened to be blowing harder than they ever could have made it with all the machinery. And my boy Killian was out there,

you know what it's like trying to not look like an idiot when you're walking through a windstorm in the desert? And yet there was a take where he pulled it off. That's in the movie. There's a take where he's climbing up where the safety and the stunt rigors and all that said, we don't know if he should, and Nolan said, I'll do it. And he went up and safety tested it.

And once the director does it, he's kind of saying, I won't ask you to do anything that I'm not willing to do, and I wasn't willing to do it because I'm foolish. I saw how it was built, and I believe it's gonna be okay. This is the role of a producer, someone who takes a project and decides the direction it's going to go in, how he hosts it. Was it a hard decision to sign up for the movie?

No, it was a no-brainer. That's great. Yeah. That's great. Not for me. Everybody else said, there's no way you. That's great. Not for me. Everybody else said, there's no way you're not doing this. And I was like, hold on, let me at least go through my usual heel digging.

They're like, you do all you want. But you're doing this? But you're showing up. Yeah. And I was like, yes, I am. And great experience. Incredible. Incredible.

And when I say exacting, I regretted using this phrase a few days ago, picking fly shit out of pepper, because it was probably on purpose taken out of context and made to seem like it was like, you know, a shitty job. No. It was an excruciatingly, wonderfully enlightening experience of doing something very meticulous. I said it's the closest thing I could compare it to would be like 100 people making a watch. It's a very enlightening experience of doing something very meticulous. I said it's the closest thing I could compare it to would be like 100 people making a watch.

Yeah. So super detailed. Yeah. And focused. But because it's so detailed and focused, Nolan himself, he's not worrying about that. He knows that the best in the business have that all under wraps.

Yeah. He's intuiting, how should we block this? I wonder where Robert wants to move. I wonder what Alden Ehrenreich is going to want to do at this point in the transition in the scene. Let me watch that. Let's twist it again. Let's give them a little more time to really feel

like I'm not rushing them to figure out where their bodies want to be before their mouths say the words. And so it was just so Spock chess next level. I needed it. I desperately needed a corrective experience. L-M-N-T. Element electrolytes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun?

Do you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best? Add element electrolytes to your daily routine. Perform better and sleep deeper. Improve your cognitive function. Experience an increase in steady energy with fewer headaches and fewer muscle cramps. Element Electrolytes. Drink it in the sauna.

Refreshing flavors include grapefruit, citrus, watermelon, and chocolate salt. Formulated with the perfect balance of sodium, potassium, and magnesium to keep you hydrated and energized throughout the day. These minerals help conduct the electricity that powers your nervous system so you can perform at your very best. Element Electrolytes are sugar-free, keto-friendly, and great tasting. Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit www.drinklmnt.com slash tetra and stay salty with element electrolyte LMNT How different are the different directors you've worked with like tell me the range sure what you get

I'll go back to kind of the beginning. Yeah, zero, American yasca, right out of the bat. Easily one of the top five directors I've ever worked with. Wow, that's interesting. And he was so put off by the experience that I don't think he ever did in another film. And yet I'm so glad that he went through what he had to go through to be put off and left me with that,

because he invested me with ultimate authority to express this character. Amazing. He was awesome. How early was that in your career? Within the first three, four years. Wow. Yeah. Which is astonishing. Yeah. And then It was astonishing. Yeah. And then Lord Richard Attenborough for Chaplain. Wow. That was like having the most emotionally connected Sigeung Master.

He was bomb watching on the top of Rada when he was growing up during the Blitz. You know, that, Gandhi, Cry Freedom, all these films he did, and then A Bridge Too Far, and then he decided that I was going to be his choice to express a modern artist in the 20th century's trials and tribulations, politically, personally, creatively, sexually.

And that was great. Oliver Stone, social commentary, once in a generation artist. John Favreau, the spirit with which we created that first Iron Man and wound up being part of this big cosmic thing of the MCU being born. He's like a brother to me. Todd Phillips, who I did this film with him

and Zach Galifianakis is just so bright and open. How's Zach? I never met him. I'm a fan from afar. He does not disappoint. Now remember when I said sometimes you just have to unspool the camera thing because you don't know where he's going to go?

I was doing a fucking scene with Zach Galifianakis and he just walked off the set because he said, oh, I'm going to have to go pee-pee. And he, like his character. Because I was saying, oh, hey man, we're going to get back in this car and we're stuck in this car together. Do you want to use the bathroom? And he's just supposed to say something.

He says, yeah, I'm going to go pee-pee. And he starts walking towards this building like a Waffle House where there might be a bathroom. And I was like, how's that gonna cut together? And Tom was like, don't worry about it. Did you end up in the film? Yes. Amazing. And I'm like, this fucking guy.

Yeah, he's free. Oh my God, so free. And yet, also part of his freedom is giving himself freedom to walk out of the frame in a scene that is not established that he goes anywhere but into a car, but practical enough to go, well, it doesn't matter, it's gonna be a cut.

Whereas I can be, if anything, a little too edged up sometimes because I still wanna be a good boy and I wanna be a good first AD and I wanna be a responsible collaborator. Yeah, you want it to work. I want it to work. And you don't wanna do something good and then have it not be usable for some technical reason. That was based on a choice collaborator. Yeah, you want it to work. I want it to work. And you don't want to do something good

and then have it not be usable for some technical reason. That was based on a choice you make. Correct. Which also then means probably on the shadow side is I do not want to be seen in an unfavorable light. You think so? I think that sometimes I am too much of a behavior. Sometimes. Talking about the different great directors, any specifics about what's different about

them? Well, I'll put it this way. I did two films with Robert Altman. And there was this long scene where my character's trying to get past a police line, and he's kind of a schmuck, and he said the night before, he goes, whatever you do tonight, don't memorize your lines. In other words, he was to the extreme of,

please don't spoil the opportunity with preparation. Let's keep it all as loose as possible, right? That's interesting. And I've heard that it's not uncommon for people to say, let's press the rainbow reset and try to have no preferences based on previous experiences for what we're going to do, which by the way, it's a great direction to give.

It's a really hard one to follow if you don't really believe that the person means it when they say it. And there are certain folks, Altman was one of them, who is when he said it, there was no way. He clearly meant it. He clearly, it was not obtuse, it was not sarcastic. He would say it with a glimmer in his eye

because he loved chaos because everything was pretty controlled. But you know, yeah, of course, sometimes you just have people who you go like, oh my God, I just realized that I've signed up to do a film with someone who has no business directing this film. Has it happened often or not too much?

No, maybe 10, 12, 20% of the time. So the averages are low. What was working with Oliver like? He was making a statement about the media and American culture and our fascination with violence. And it was so prophetic. Natural born killers. Now, at the time...

It was with Woody, too, yes? Amazing. Come on, dude. And by the way, Ryan D'Agostino just also interviewed Woody. This will be for Esquire magazine. And Woody kind of cut loose. So I was like, all right, I can start telling some of the real story.

The night before Woody had one of his biggest scenes, I pounded on his door at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe and wouldn't let him sleep a wink. I brought in all my extracurricular party favors, and I force-fed him a wild night. But during the course of that night, I also brought up some questions a wild night. But during the course of that night, I also brought up some questions

about his character's backstory and truth that were relevant to the scenes he was going to shoot the next day. So even that crazy semi-debush interaction we had, where I'm sure he was cursing me the next morning, he did say after the fact that it was kind of a critical turning point as far as the way he was exploring playing Mickey Knox.

And so even in those moments, looking back, we loved it, oh, that was just misspent youth and we were all so irresponsible. It was like, no, even with that lost kind of super sex drugs and rock and roll generation, at the heart of it, people were trying to move the needle forward. And Oliver Stone is the kind of director who you realize you're working with someone

who's trying to say something that could be important and you can be part of that. So you don't wanna fuck it up. The positive part of the night before, was that intentional or it just happened to happen? Oh dude, I was just out of my mind. I also was happy to be on location and there were these other two folks

who were playing in the film, they were called the Barbarian Twins or the Barbarian Brothers or something, there were these big guys. It was that time right before the downside of heroin chic had come back in and there was so many things that I had yet to even experience as far as my own proclivities

and all that stuff. It was back in that kind of like manageable partying too much phase. And then kind of like the society that Oliver was predicting, and in a small way society itself kind of did go over this indulgent cliff and we have the myriad tragedies that followed. Yeah.

Have you read his book, Oliver's? No. It's so beautiful. Really? It's his biography, but it's just the first part. And I think he's writing the second part now. And it's so beautifully written. You'll love it.

Can't wait. It's great. And his Untold History of the United States. Unbelievable. Can't get enough of it. What I love about it also is you can watch it over and over and continue to see new things. That's the thing, dude.

Believe it or not, here's how- It's so dense. Yes, here's how weird I am. And I've always wondered about people. It's like, this guy eats a tuna fish sandwich and potato chips with a Snapple every day for lunch. And I go... That says a lot about this guy.

But I'll fall asleep or drift off to Oliver Stone's untold history of the United States. I've done it hundreds of times. And my wife goes, is it soothing you to drift off to the sound of howitzers, the Cold War, and Gorbachev, and, you know, the age of terror? And I go like, I'm just trying to figure out

what the fuck era we're in. And I don't want to miss the references because I want to try to be additive. Maybe the way I can be additive is in making a statement within the context of what Nolan did. But there's some part of me that just, I don't want to miss the message. You've been on the top of the mountain.

You've been in the bottom of the pit. Do you feel like you're the same person the whole time going through these cycles? I feel like at essence, nothing's changed. And these fragment personalities that either were hardwired in by events, not necessarily traumatic ones. I'm also a bit of an imitator,

and that I noticed that a lot of my life has been taking on the characteristics of those, not in a simulator, not in a Ripley way, but like there's a lot of my uncle Jim in me. There's a lot of Anthony Michael Hall in my wit because he was the person who brought me into doing my first studio comedy. There's some James Woods in there.

There's some Oliver Stone in there. There's even nowadays a little bit of Chris Nolan in there. So A, I'm not wanting for my own personality, but I've noticed that at times when I've been more or less secure, more or less well, more or less attuned, I can see a conflagration of several key selves kind of fighting to take center stage. But the source self clearly has largely unsoiled. Beautiful, beautiful.

It's great. Would you say you found happiness over the course of your life? Genuinely, and yet I wonder if happiness is, happiness as a goal is rough. Happiness is a byproduct of right action. I love it. But sometimes I can do all the right things and gain no satisfaction.

That's when I need to reflect and say what defect or what limitation that I've come to believe is holding me back from because dude, I regret nothing except the times that I have beat myself up or been too emotionally or psychologically tough on those around me because we're all trying to do something that is so difficult. And so to tighten the screws on any of it is just like, come on.

How different will your performance be based on the person that you're acting with or against? In a vacuum, there's a range that, depending on external circumstances, will roughly be about where you think it is on the graph. And then, you never get to choose the when or the who. There are things where there's a chemistry that transcends even the reality of the connection. Sometimes the universe just requires you to make music with her or them.

And it goes like, this is our sweet spot. This is the music at the spheres. And once in a while, you wind up with a scene partner or a creative partner where you go like, all we gotta do is show up. It just seems like this dance works no matter what we do. Now it's still work. Jude Law in the Sherlock series is such a natural partner.

Wouldn't you like look into each other's eyes? Do you feel like I'm on a strong team? Is that what the feel, like what's the feeling when it's working with a collaborator? Regardless of what the implied status is, it's that you know I'm here to throw up the balls and you're gonna serve them. Or I'm great on the returns, you're great on the volleys.

And you just kind of understand without any ego, you go I see you, Navi, it's an avatar thing. I fully see how we fit together. And I'm not going to pretend that even if I wish it was a little different than it is. And correspondingly, one of my favorite phrases is, if you can't be an athlete, be an athletic supporter. And lately, the crazy thing is, is after all these years,

I'm back to being a supporting actor. Yeah. The thing I just... The celebrated one. Fine. Yes. Yeah. And crazily enough, the first little prize I ever got

was Santa Monica High School, 1982, best supporting actor for playing Will Parker in the musical Oklahoma. Somehow or other, I didn't lose it. It must have gone through 15 storage containers, but I kept it. That's amazing. And now between that and what happened in March,

it's very odd. Like sometimes you have these things that are a sign of a probable future if the stars align, at God's willing, are you? And then sometimes you hold up that other pillar and you just feel the energy of the million steps that happen between. That has been a very odd meditation.

that happen between. That has been a very odd meditation. So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy, using one of Squarespace's best-in-class templates. With the built-in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins, and menus, so your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs.

Discover unbreakable creativity with Fluid Engine, a highly intuitive drag-and-drop editor. No coding or technical experiences required. Understand your site's performance with in-depth website analytics tools. Squarespace has everything you need to succeed online. Create a blog. Monetize a newsletter. Make a marketing portfolio.

Launch an online store. The Squarespace app helps you run your business from anywhere. Track inventory and connect with customers while you're on the go. Whether you're just starting out or already managing a successful brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit squarespace.com slash tetra and get started today. One of the things that was interesting about when Iron Man happened, the first Iron Man, is that before that we thought of superhero movies in a particular way.

And it seemed like regardless of who was in them, they would dumb themselves down to be in that thing. And that changed with you and Iron Man. It's like it felt like a real actor could make something happen in the context of this spectacle. And it felt like it changed the genre for the better. Yeah.

And look, hindsight is 20-20, but also, you know, Michael Keaton, Val Comer, George Clooney, there had been extremely talented people in those roles and I enjoyed all those films. The funny thing was, it was almost like we had to come from the underground and thank God it was considered to be a B-level superhero, not a top tier one. And thank God that Stan Lee had actually thought about it, a superhero who had no powers in and of himself,

it was technology. You could say the same thing about Batman, but Batman also had this weird psychological bent where he wanted to essentially cosplay. Tony is much more of an outward schmuck who undergoes this extremely symbolic transformation. But he's a tech guy. And how weird is that for nowadays?

As a matter of fact, all my Silicon Valley friends and I've met more and more of them over the last couple of years and I find them fascinating. They say their pillars of films are Social Network and The First Iron Man. Amazing. What's the first movie you remember seeing in childhood? I think it might've been Fantasia, dude.

And do you remember being in good experience? I found it mortifying. I also remember being scared shitless of Bambi. Well, sad Bambi. Yeah. Maybe it was something about, I think people underrate how good the screen and sound qualities were even back in the 70s.

Yeah. Like, you know, sense around was for real, bro. Yeah. You know? Yeah, it was. And the screens were bigger then, too. The screens were bigger. Even the Hayden Planetarium, I remember going there and feeling like,

whoa, this is too much. And I remember going to those 42nd Street theaters and going like, bro, it's a little skanky in here, but man, what an experience, and what a group participation gestalt therapy we're all having and blah, blah, blah. I think it was just scary to grow up in a massive urban environment like that

and being 1,000 or 1,500 days old and all this stuff, the air is thick with all of this cultural and international conflict and I heard it. I heard it all going on in the kitchen and over the poker table, and in the arguments, and my dad yelling at the black and white TV, at Johnson and Nixon, I heard it all,

and the idea was like, hey man, you know, like, we're seeing this, we ain't fucking cool with it. You know, I was like. And New York in the 70s was like, it was a rough place and there were boarded up buildings. It's not New York now. Yeah. And the crazy thing though is, I love it when people say, New York is over and it's so scary on the streets.

And I go like, eh. The information age has modulated up the mildest threat to seem like the cover of an important publication. But also when you don't know any better, like you know, I love the kids under 12 that are growing up in New York City right now, because they understand. It's not step on a crack, break your mother's back.

It's watch out for that Uber and that e-bike. They will crown you as you're trying to step off the curb. And that situational awareness that our generation had to learn writ large for whatever little trauma it left, how valuable to just go like, there's a big grid of activity going on here, and like, I am an ant. Yeah. Okay, speaking about that, can we talk about prison? Sure. What was that like?

Okay. Not terrible. Jail and county jail in particular. And also you never forget your first time. You never forget your first time. The first 12 days I ever did were in a psych module just because they wanted to keep me away from everyone. And they were just terrible because all there is

is the mattress. And have you ever heard of court cam? And they were just terrible because they, all there is is the mattress. And you ever, have you ever heard of court cam? It's this rather impressively entertaining show about everything that goes wrong in court when you have all these like bailiffs having to attack the guy who's charged him and these things. Oh, dude, just, if you just Google court cam and just do highlights 2023, I guarantee it. Just my experience.

County jail, first 12 days, psych module, gnarly. And psych module, when I hear psych module, I think of hospital, I don't think of bars on the window. Are there bars on the window? Rather than bars on the window, because someone could be crazy and try to squeeze through those bars and get caught and then you got a common side

of the bars off, imagine those kind of metal doors with a glass square window with a chicken wire going through it like that. I saw this one dude, I just saw his face and he was this old bearded dude, and he looked like John Barrymore. He was crazy, and he was shit talking the correctional officers all day long,

just like, motherfucking them, and you are a mental midget, and blah, blah, blah. I found it very entertaining, because he was kind of witty. And then one day they said, God damn it, Berturt, that's enough. And they popped open the door and he had one leg and he wasn't wearing a prosthesis

where he was amputated from the knee down on the other leg. And I thought, this motherfucker's been standing on one leg all day just so he can talk shit to all these cops. And I was like, respect. That's unbelievable. That was the first 12 days. Then I fell short of Judge Lawrence Myra's designation

for what the conditions of my suspended sentence were. I had a three-year suspended sentence, which meant I can send you back for three years if I decide right now you can be out on the street if you do the right thing. I didn't, I pissed dirty or something like that. And he sent me to county and I think I did four months and 19 days. That was far and away the most disgusting, awful 139 days of my life. Yep. Is it because of the place, because of the other inmates?

What makes it bad? Well, jail is usually a year or less, which also means nobody is designated of whether you're a petty criminal, whether you're a child molester, whether you're a petty criminal, whether you're a child molester, whether you're white collar crime, whether you didn't pay your parking tickets, or whether you're someone who they haven't figured out yet is a serial killer or a homicidal gang banger or whatever and you're all just together. Now they have different designations.

The smell, the energy, the lack of time outside, the need to, and I'm on their side, control this criminal element. The fact that these sheriffs, they're in there with you. They're doing time fucking with these people, The fact that these sheriffs are, they're in there with you. They're doing time fucking with these people and they're trying to keep right. And it's just, it's fucking purgatory. So I would take this kind of knotty white blanket

and then put a sheet over the top of it because that way it would lock in the heat. And I remember sleeping on my side when I'd gotten somehow or other managed to get in trouble while in jail. Do you remember what you did? Yeah. Um.

And I was laying on my side. And when I woke up in the morning, the cockroaches would just kind of scurry off the thing. And there was what's known as freeway freddies, which are all the little mice and stuff that are scurrying along back and forth, trying to outrun the sheriffs that are walking down the hall and they know if they see them, they'll call maintenance.

So you could just see, like, you hear the door crack and you hear the first few steps of a boot and you just see a bunch of mice and shit go by, big cockroaches just, I mean like, nightmarish. And yet, I got used to the fact of you're in a hibernative state. The less hours of the day you are awake, the better this is going to be. And you got to do the time or it'll do you. So you can't fall out of season with the day. In other words, you don't want to be up all night

and sleep all day. That's depressive. You want to get up, you want to get your morning chow, you want to try to entertain yourself, you want to blah, blah, blah. If you're not in a lockdown module because you've misbehaved, which I often was, you try to get out to the day room. And so that's jail, right? So we talked about psych module.

Would you make friends? They say in those situations, you don't make friends, you make acquaintances. I'll tell you a story about a friend I made later. So psych module in jail, you know what that is. Jail in general, whether I was in Old Men's County, which was what I was just describing, or the Twin Towers, which were affectionately called the Glamour Slammer because they were more modern. A, there were times when I just had a single cellmate and the door would close at the end of the day,

not to be opened until morning shift and chow, where you realize you will never be safer than you are for those seven hours. As long as you know your celly isn't crazy, because you're inside somewhere that's impossible to get into and nobody would try to, there's cops everywhere, and you've been locked in this two-man cell.

When I had that realization, I remember it like it was yesterday, I was like, this is a realization I didn't need to have. You dumb fucker, what have you done? And I was like, don't worry about that. Let's just get through this. Then later on, when I further disappointed the judge and he threw the book, his wig, the gavel

and the bench at me, I wound up catching a chain, which means they send you to a processing center before they decide what prison you're going to go to. Now you're out of the small time leagues of jail a year or less. Now you're going up the river, as they say. And would the other people who are up the river be people who had similar issues that you had, or would it be more like murderers and? 80% of all crimes involve someone usually being under the influence of something, if

not multiple things at the time. That's interesting. That and more exacerbated mental illnesses. So I catch the chain up to the processing center in Delano. And that three weeks that I spent there before I was designated where I was going to go, which wound up being Corcoran State, which is where Manson was at the time on a different yard, those were the most terrifying three weeks plus, because everybody's up there and they have yet to be designated,

but there's more freedom. So it's like a very unfiltered prison. And- More dangerous, would you say, because of that? Of course, because people haven't been designated, but they're starting to realize that they're going away, maybe for the rest of their life. And then there's some punk over here who blah, blah, blah.

And they have nothing to lose. No. At one point, this Japanese guy asked me to come and hold hands with him and pray. And I was like, and I looked around, I was like, I could take this guy. And whenever I took his hands, and he was like, oh, do you really, Father?

And I was like, fuck. And he goes, what brings you here? And I was like, parole violation. I go, and you? He goes, I killed my wife. And I was like, motherfucker. Many other incidents there, and then prison in and of itself is the least daunting of all of them because it's much more organized.

And also I was in what at the time, SATF substance abuse treatment facility, it was trying to introduce that proposition in that was giving people rehabilitation, et cetera. So I was there for a year, 14 months, 16 months, and then they realized that I'd been over-sentenced, and so I got out a few months early. I mean, you wanna talk about banana shit.

Don't get in trouble to the point where you have a suspended sentence, particularly if you have no way of really knowing how to stop the behaviors that got you there to begin with. And yet, I really came to appreciate the behaviors that got you there to begin with. And yet, I really came to appreciate the law enforcement side, which is people need to be fucking warehoused sometimes.

And I wonder, looking back, if I didn't need to be for that period of time. It didn't cure my alcoholism by any stretch of the imagination, but it gave me a reference point for. Did you have insights through the process, would you say? Absolutely. Sting's album, Brand New Day, came out, That gave me a reference point for... Did you have insights through the process, would you say? Absolutely. Sting's album, Brand New Day, came out,

and I got it on a CD, and I had ordered through the canteen system a little cheapo CD player. That album, albums before that, I remember 1983 when Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom came out. There's certain albums, in this case, I was a captive audience. There was no reason to not listen to this album.

I was able to dissect every note of what I consider one of his best albums, and that's Sanson. Brand New Day was great. Anyway, I did make, you could say, and that's Sainsong. Brand new day was great. Anyway, I did make, you could say, acquaintances with your typical guy, like Figaroa Slim, the pimp from downtown Los Angeles, and he told me all these stories I'll never forget, but I did make friends with somebody

who had been in for a long time, then got out, and then was facing a three strike case that was gonna be sent away forever. Me and some friends got him off that third strike life sentence by rallying around him and giving support and asking the judge to offer blah, blah, blah. And he did get off that life sentence

and was not able to correct his behavior. So it is amazing how many life sentence and was not able to correct his behavior. So it is amazing how many lashes we can take and still not get the first principle lesson of what the universe is reflecting back to us when it comes to, bro, you can't fucking do that. Because we're so unconsciously wired to be unaware of our actions. And in some way, it speaks to your strength.

It's like, do you know what I'm saying? It's like, you have to be very strong to not get the message. Correct. And to continue to be beaten down and still stand up for whatever it is that you're standing up for, again, it's not in your best interest, but it's interesting.

You're onto something big, and it's this. And I think that the weird thing is it's a character trait gone awry. The character trait is this. I will not capitulate. And I go, ooh, don't lose that. But apply it here. Because not capitulating is a noble gesture.

Yes. Yeah. It was just misplaced in this case. Or it wasn't. And yet, you know, and I don't know, maybe you could give me some insight. I don't know, was I, did I have to have that and have that be part of my story to be who I am? Well, it is, so there's some perfection

in everything that happens. Maybe not in the moment it's happening. Right. Sometimes, I talk about it in the book, if you can zoom out as if you're watching a movie and thinking, how's our hero gonna get out of this? Because that's what we see in the movies. It's like you're put in these terrible situations,

you're on the edge of your seat, you don't know how, but somehow by the end of the movie, it works out. Yes, and that's why great creatives too, like the Russo brothers who I did the last two Avengers films with and Civil War, three Marvel picks with, have projects with now, went back recently and watched Arrested Development,

which they were directors on. They literally get ahead of the game. They love creating themselves into a corner that is impossible to find an unpainted way out of, because they go, that's when I grow. And of course, that's all happening within the realm of our creative venture, so it's relatively safe. Those real world stakes are gnarly.

I'm just so glad. I don't care how gnarly the rear view mirror is. Yeah. I don't care. As a matter of fact, I can take pride in the rear view mirror. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because you did it.

You did your time. Yeah. And you live to rise above. Welcome to the house of macadamias. Macadamias are a delicious superfood, sustainably sourced directly from farmers. Macadamias, a rare source of omega-7, linked to collagen regeneration, enhanced weight management and better fat metabolism. Macadamias are healthy and brain boosting fats.

Macadamias, paleo-friendly, keto and plant-based. Macadamias, no wheat, no dairy, no gluten, no GMOs, no preservatives, no palm oil, no added sugar. House of macadamias. I roasted with Namibian sea salt, cracked black pepper, and chocolate dips. Snack bars come in chocolate, coconut white chocolate, and blueberry white chocolate. Visit houseofmacadamias.com slash tetra. Was there any point along the way where you felt like I I'm not going to make it? I had a moment of clarity on July 4th, 2004, where I said, dude, it's over. And I'd never heard it was such authority.

And I'd seen all these instances of outside authority telling me where the boundary was, where the limit was, where the end was, where the punishment, the result was, the repercussions, the wreckage was. But I'd never heard it so clearly. And because I was struck with a moment of open-mindedness to say, that sounds legit. And I'm not saying that all of my proclivities to self-medicate were lifted, but it began, it was a blasting cap. And it began this process. Any idea what triggered it?

Part of it was a fear unlike any fear I'd felt before. And fear will motivate us for a while, but sometimes fear is a great first stepping stone, but you can't stay there because, you know, boy, it's crazy how short-lived the memory of an inherent mortal threat is. Yeah. So from that moment, what changed? Well, according to Attenborough, going back to Lord Richard, he said, Robert, one day you shall find your ambition.

And when you truly grasp it, all of these behaviors will just slip away. And I was like, this guy's fucking getting a little long in the tooth. You did that beautifully by the way. Thank you. That was beautiful. And I never want to say that anything

is definitively one thing or the other, but it turns out Dickie was right. I had thwarted completion of even getting more than just up to speed, only to be derailed by a foggy ambition. And I thought, what if I actually, without requiring specific results, just said, I kind of want to wind up personally, professionally,

emotionally, physically, spiritually, first and foremost, in this new area. And the crazy thing is when we straighten out spiritually, everything else follows. And yet, it's the most subtle and the most elusive. Yeah. So, what was it? The love of a good woman putting me in check and saying,

I don't do this. I don't do this, Sid, with sober Nancy. I don't play this fucking game. And I was like, God, she's not kidding. It was a little of that. It was a little ambition. It was a little, I'm sensing that there's a future where I can be reflecting all this and I can be additive and I will be invested with these properties

that I may not even actually possess, but they're in the rear view mirror and they're on paper and they happen, so why not step into that role? I could be an elder statesman one day. Yeah. Did you ever have the feeling like I've already done that? Was that a thing?

I think it's normal to self-protect and say there's very little left undone. I mean, for your old life, though. Oh, gosh. You mean like, do I wish I'd turned over a couple more stones? No, tell me. No, no, no. I mean, if you've had enough experiences of escape, where you feel like I've done that enough

to know what that is, and now I'm gonna do something different than that. Sure, well I would temper that with adding in this little subtle thread, which is the bottom is where you stop digging, brother. And if you have a proclivity to not capitulate and that non-capitulation is tainted or twisted in a weird direction, there is one way this ends and you know it. So start telling the story of where you broke the chains of bondage.

Start believing that that story is coming for you. Amazing. Would you say your use was to get high or to escape? I think it was everything. It was to commune, it was to differentiate, it was to prove how hardcore I was, it was to give me permission to be kind of like a boring continuation of that mid-century ideal

of live fast die young, it was for my father's approval. It was to try to fix the things that had broken. And more than that, it was for the effect. And then strangely, when the effect turned from a pleasant effect to a horrific effect, then clearly it was for that effect. So then what was I addicted to? If the effect changed, but I stayed on that button,

then what am I addicted to? And what does that say? Tell me a little bit about your spiritual life. I'll start with yesterday. I was doing some qigong and then wing chun. There's this thing called the way of the small thought, qi lim tao. And you're following this ball outside your hand. And you're moving with it, letting it come back and doing it again. And by the time you're done with this seal and tau form,

you've actually expressed every block you can use. But it's this meditation on just this small thing. So- The small thing is the ball? The small thing is the ball. The small thing is the thought. The thought is it's only the ball, when in fact all these myriad computational complexities

of the physical frame are occurring in a very coordinated and specific and evolved way. Yet the small thought is just that I'm guarding my center, I'm using two hands at the same time, I'm not fighting force with force. I'm using all the tenets of this system, the way the small thought, right? Our friend Isaac reintroduced me to TM. I was killing it for a couple weeks. I got busy, it slipped off.

And so I think that the important thing is that I never wanna fall off the continental shelf. I always want to feel that I have little systems at play where there's always something I can do to get me out of the monkey mind. But it started when I was very young, I was so attracted to, I was reading Richard Hittleman's 28-day yoga book,

and I was one of the first people to be eating health food, and I was reading Shirley MacLaine, and books about the Upanishads, and human energy systems, and Casey, and the Seth material, and you know, I was obsessed with all of it, while refusing to use any of it to my immediate advantage. And then it was my love of the discipline of whether I was singing in madrigals,

learning that melody in German because I wanted to compete in the Kwanee Solo Festival singing Schubert, or the discipline of doing theater or the discipline of going okay, I know it's the 80s and we're all partying, but I wanna create a character here for this movie with Rodney Dangerfield. Maybe my hair should be different every scene

and I should have these crazy wardrobe changes. And maybe Derek's just kind of like this wildfire crackacker of a buddy. So part of the meditation or spirituality really was trying to infuse my work with my love of doing something hard and again, providing that service. It seems like something that when you take on a role, it seems to take on a role,

it seems to take on a different life than what may have originally been on the page. Would you say that? Is that true? Yeah. Yeah, there's been a bunch of times. Going back to Zach Galifianakis and Todd Phillips, when we did this film called Due Date, which is a high recommend, it's a weird romp, but it's a very evolved romp. I was playing a guy who's really just kind of pissed off and his wife is expecting and he's stuck with this fucking guy

and the guy got him kicked off a plane and they have to drive across country. And I realized as I was doing it that I was actually playing the angriest character I'd ever played. And this guy had a hair trigger that was so strong that he could actually do anything that he wanted.

And I was like, oh, I'm gonna was actually playing the angriest character I'd ever played. And this guy had a hair trigger anger problem. And I never thought of myself as an angry person. But I've also always thought that anger was the most embarrassing emotion, worse than fear. Fear everybody can relate to. Ang anger feels more like a lack of control. And yet, I got so much out of playing this angry uptight guy.

Is it a comedy? Oh yeah. For some reason, angry people are really funny. Something about it. Something about, because it's always about, like, overreaction. Absolutely. It's funny. Yes, and it's also playing against Zach, who plays this very, I mean, crazy-making character, but honestly very sweet, good-natured guy. I'm a good nature guy, and so the problem is, my character, Peter Hyman, is stuck on Ethan Tremblay's annoyance

to the exclusion of realizing that this guy is offering him a beautiful new perspective on life. So anyway, I loved it. I remember when I heard that Rihanna loved it, I was like, God, we did something right, dude. How important would you say humor is in your life? I mean, morning, noon, and night, I need it. You know, it's also this expectation in my core relationships, which is everybody knows that we're artists and we can be moody and we're particular

and you have to pack just carefully. Sometimes Susan calls me Rain Man. Sometimes she calls me Phantom Thread. But underneath it all is this levity where she understands that I am conscious enough and recovered enough to know that none of us are easy. And I do love to keep things light. There's no greater joy than making someone laugh.

Yeah. Do you feel like you ever use it as a defense mechanism? Oh yeah. And again, game bread. My dad and his generation and a lot of these guys, it was a way to avoid the topics that were not processable due to where their generation was at in the post-war era. So the crazy thing is I'm a lot more like them

than I am like these kind of more emotionally honest and free generations I've seen popping up. And so it's always something for me to keep just knocking away at, you know? But I can always tell when I start taking myself too seriously, it's just the kiss of death. Yeah.

Would you say you're satisfied with your body of work thus far? Sure. Good answer. But I would also say this, it's so funny looking back on any body of work that it's all with this kind of wavy, gravy stuff. Absolutely.

And when you wanna curate just a highlight reel and just do a sizzle reel of everything that went perfectly, I think you're not embracing, and again, this is brought up in your book, as was my last point, the totality of it's the glory, it's the mess, it's the miss. The sizzle wheel of the lowest moments should probably be great too in their own way. Seriously.

100%. And maybe more interesting. But isn't it funny who'd ever say that? The sizzle wheel of the lowest moment should probably be great too in their own way. Seriously. 100%. And maybe more interesting. But isn't it funny who would ever sign up for that? That would be, as a matter of fact, therapeutically and spiritually, that should be on a loop because that's what we're afraid of. We're afraid of the low light.

And they're always okay. The fizzle reel. That's what we're afraid of. What may fall within the sphere of tetragrammaton? Counterculture? Tetragrammaton. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammaton. The avant-garde? Tetragrammaton. Counterculture? Tetragrammaton. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammaton. The Avant-Garde?

Tetragrammaton. Generative art? Tetragrammaton. The Tarot? Tetragrammaton. Out of print music? Tetragrammaton. Biodynamics?

Tetragrammaton. Graphic design? Tetragrammaton. Mythology and magic? Tetragrammaton. Obscure film? Tetragrammaton. Beach culture? Tetragrammaton, mythology and magic. Tetragrammaton, obscure film. Tetragrammaton, beach culture. Tetragrammaton, esoteric lectures.

Tetragrammaton, off the grid living. Tetragrammaton, alt. Spirituality. Tetragrammaton, the canon of fine objects. Tetragrammaton, muscle cars. Tetragrammaton, ancient wisdom for a new age. Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn. How would you say you approach your craft different than your contemporaries?

I would say that on many levels, I have a very particular set of experiences. And while I can get as wedged up as the next guy, that generally speaking, I approach things as though I'm walking around them, surveying them, and eventually I intend to wade in or strike or drain the swamp or do something that seems like more of an effort, but I try. And my default is always probably to over iterate. So it's two things. One is I think I'm different in that I'm just very fucking peculiar. And I think that I've grown to a point

where I'm a little more like Bob Duvall at the end of Colors. It's that joke that Sean Penn tells about the bulls wanting to go down and bang the cows. He says, let's run down there and bang one of them cows. And the older bull says, no, no, let's walk down and bang the cows. He says, let's run down there and bang one of them cows. And the older bull says, no, no, let's walk down and bang them all.

I'm a little more of that, let's be conservative and let's deploy energy where we can. So I think what I am, I'm not saying that I do this better than anyone, but I think what I am quite good at is a measuring dispersal of energy over time. I think that I'm one of the more efficient actors around. That's cool.

Yeah. Has a director ever asked you to make it bigger or do more? Of course. Really? Yeah. Yeah, more or do less. Please just do nothing this time. Yeah. Because the camera's gonna pick it up. Enjoy it more. Yeah, yeah, more, do less, please just do nothing this time

because the camera's gonna pick it up. Enjoy it more. I remember on the second Iron Man, Farrow was like, dude, why so angry? I was like, am I angry? He goes, yeah, maybe you're just working through something, but like, take the edge off. Tony Stark was aggressive, but not angry.

And I go, but isn't it different this time in the movie? He goes, yeah, but not in the scene, just fucking calm down. And that's a weird one too, because you never wanna be caught feeling like you're out of the vibe. But I also just think I've been caught in the act of doing it wrong in so many different ways that I don't really have that much attachment

to what I thought it was supposed to be. Yeah. And it's hard to know also, because you're inside of you, and the experience is outside of you. Yeah. So it helps to have a director who could say, if you were trying to get this,

it didn't happen on the camera. Yeah. You know? Yeah. There's this last element too, which is, I don't know when I started recognizing this. I think it was around the time that I was doing this film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang with Val Kilmer that Shane Black directed and then up through the first Iron Man. There was this year period where I did Iron Man, Tropic Thunder, and the first Sherlock. And I noticed in all these three very different stories,

I would watch playback and I started noticing that when you have a good frame and a good lens and a good kind of shape, it just works. And so in a way it was one of those things like, I'm not as important as I thought. The geometry. And also doing less might keep the beauty of what's there. Correct.

You could screw it up. I could screw it up and my subtlest things, when I was doing them in a more subtle way, I knew that there was some intent behind it, but I never knew that I a more subtle way. I knew that there was some intent behind it, but I never knew that I could do it well. Because on the natch, I think you would even, just by the last hour, I'm pretty rubbery and animated

and a little spasmodic. So it's counterintuitive to just settle. So it's counterintuitive to just settle. How different was the experience of making a CGI movie where you're acting and what you're playing against isn't actually there? Fortunately, the very first movie, movie I ever did was Weird Science. Oh.

And I was watching- I didn't know that. Yeah, I was watching Anthony Michael Hall and there's Pershing Missiles coming up through the middle of this party gone weird, sciency and all that stuff. And I remember green screens and special effects makeups and practical things where steam's coming out of the floor. And I'd heard about those kinds of films and I knew that Spielberg made these big spectacle films and that some of these things, obviously ET wasn't really riding a bike.

So I knew that there were elements that were matte animation. So I'd gotten a glimpse of it and then kind of went more into quote unquote more serious cinema for a while. So by the time I got back to it, it was jarring for a minute, and then it just became very old hat. And the last couple Avengers films, I mean, there was this one thing that happens.

I think Avengers, Infinity War ends in this kind of the snap where Thanos kind of wins. And I just remember that whole part of shooting was on the call sheet said this on the planet Titan, and it just said Titan continuous. And we were on Titan continuous, it seemed like forever. And it was just this craggy set surrounded by green screens. Wow.

And I came to love it because you go like, wow, however good it looks unfinished, imagine what happens when these craft people put in all this stuff. Tell me about the Chaplin experience. So around 1990, I'd done less than zero. I'd had a great experience working with James Woods, I had done less than zero. I'd had a great experience working with James Woods, making a movie called True Believer.

And I was back in LA and I heard that at the time Sir Richard Attenborough was casting to do a film about Chaplin. And I went in to meet for it. And I was, I guess, not exactly Mr. First Choice, but then it came down to, there's two times in my life where it came down to a screen test, and it was definitive, Iron Man and Chaplin. And I remember obsessively preparing for this screen test

that wound up being kind of chaotic and dissipative, and not really everything I was trying to get into a screen test but it showed the promise and the potential when I was cast. Then in a time not unlike last year, there was something going on with the parent company, Carolco and TriStar and it kept getting delayed. And because it kept getting delayed, I wound up having about nine months to prepare. And every three months or so, Dickie would say, Robert, I'm not sure. We're trying to get the funding.

We're almost there. And I was just flying all around the United States and trying to learn as much as I did. So I gave myself a crash course in vaudeville, slapstick, fall down choreography. I really tried to get the received pronunciation RP, the phonetic alphabet for speaking the various types of English you did, being a cockney who then became more refined, then became Americanized. Would you do this all on your own

or would you hire experts to train you? They would provide some support and I literally went mental. I had a whole wall with the entire history of every biography, autobiography that had ever been done on Chaplin. I was cross-referencing dates. I actually sent the guy who wrote

the definitive Chaplin biography notes on things that he probably wanted to amend in the next one because I was fact-checking his shit, and he was like, my God, this guy's right. So I was out on a limb. I probably went full manic panic, and then we started shooting, and I was very inflated and very confident,

and Attenborough put me in check, and then was a sweetheart from the first day therein. And I stood corrected, and I wound up having this lovely experience. And, you know, getting to work with Dan Aykroyd and getting to do scenes with Kevin Kline and having Anthony Hopkins be the interviewer and having all these gals, Penelope Ann Miller

and Marisa Tomei and anyway, the list of the supporting players in this were astonishing. And then I remember by the end, we're shooting where he's essentially been exiled after he went on this trip for his supposed communist leanings and he never came back to the U.S. And I was thinking about this the other day. He had this beautiful house up on Summit and I guess he just never went back after 1952. And then he came back for the Academy Awards

when he was given an honorary Oscar, and he was very moved by it. So we're doing that scene where Chaplin is 72, roughly 83 years old, and I'm in full prosthesis. And at this point, Attenborough came up to me and said, Robert, Sven and I have lit it, we're wondering if you could give us a single tear. And at that point I looked at him, I said,

left eye or right? He goes, Sven would prefer the left. I said, no problem, boss. And by the end of that shoot, he had so lovingly trained me and imparted all of his knowledge of the 60 years he'd been doing this beforehand, that we were technically on a shorthand

where he could ask me to produce anything and I could ask for specifics on that and make it happen. And it's simple. You let them well up, but you keep this, try to blink this eye somewhat less significantly, feel the feelings for sure and then just give it the slightest tip and let gravity take over. Unbelievable. And I reproduced that. It's like, oh, Sven said, sorry, I just wanted to angle it a bit

more this way, it's going to move a lot but you do the same thing. And I think I produced that highly technical result three or four times. Unbelievable. And yet it speaks to the prowess of an external thus, not to make blanket statements, British approach, Gilgud, O'Toole, so many of these guys, even though their emotional inner life was so critical. Just the craft is so deep.

That's it. Yeah, beautiful. Did you have to learn to like roller skate or what are some of the things you had to learn to do, Chaplin? Pratt Falls? Yes, and falling, there was this guy named Johnny Hutch. Johnny Hutch on the Benny Hill Show?

Yeah. He was the bald guy that Benny went like that to. Yes. Johnny Hutch still had the transcripts from Carnot's players, and he still had the exact choreography for skits that Chaplin was in when he was playing the drunk in the box.

So we attempted to recreate that. He was this little Scottish guy. Yeah. He was amazing. Dude, he drilled me with an inch of my life. And so I got that down. I worked with a movement coach named Dan Kamen and a bunch of other people. I learned to play tennis left-handed

and the roller skating was a bridge too far. But my favorite memory of this is I'm doing a scene on the beach with Diane Lane, who's playing Paulette Goddard, his third wife. And we have kids and I'm kind of playing for them and doing this thing that makes it look like I'm walking downstairs as I walk behind something, right? And then I'm supposed to take a beach ball

and spin it on my finger. Well, I'd gone and seen the Harlem Globetrotters, but I'd never spun a ball on my finger in my life. And it's a beach ball. And I'm trying to do it and trying to do it, and it's windy, and I can't do it. And I look over in my periphery, and I see there's a 12- old kid standing offsite with another beach ball

and he's just spinning on his hand and making it go. And I said, motherfucker. And Atmar goes, Robin, about 10 minutes ago, great. And I go, kid, kid, come here, come here. And I made him come in my trailer. And I said, how did you do that? Because you just throw it up. I go, no, no, don't say you throw it up.

Where are you starting? How do you spin it? Are you bringing it down? He goes, you just throw it up. I go, no, no, don't say you throw it up. Where are you starting? How do you spin it? Are you bringing it down? He goes, no, no, no. You kind of go up and meet it, and then you come down. I go, well, how do you spin it? He goes, you've got to kind of tip it in a little bit. All of a sudden, I was in a crash course from a complete nondescript, absolute stranger

12-year-old because there was a piece of business I had to execute. Again, this is music to your ears that you've been playing and people are catching the buzz about again, which is you must be willing to check your ego so quick, because you've got to get the job done and if you don't know something, you've got to figure out how to do it

And if someone's doing it, it doesn't matter how it looks just ask them Yeah, and paying attention what's going on around you. It's so hard, dude Yeah, it's because it's all around us the information's there it is But man, it's hard. Why the resistance why knowing that it's required to even Meet the basic metrics of what our job description is. I know. Why? I don't know.

Okay, bro. Was that the first time you played a character who was not a fictional character? I believe so. And how is it different, or in terms of like the expectation of everybody knows what Charlie Chaplin looks like, how he moves. It seems like you have less freedom playing Chaplin than any other character.

Yeah, well, like Iron Man, it was daunting in that I said, God, this guy's a globally recognizable figure. I don't have his eye color. How will I, how will I, how will I? And I got a one-way mirror. It's crazy. I got a one-way mirror and I had a TV screen and I was playing, stopping, forward framing

these chaplain shorts and stuff. And then I would try to put it close enough to where my face would be right over his and I could see my face. And it was kind of like a, I was doing essentially an effect. Yeah. And I literally just, he would go,

and I would go, oh god damn it, I didn't do that right. Did you go left or right first? And I would just match, match, match. So, you know, a lot, a lot, a lot of monkey see, monkey do, and then I thought, but I have to make this my own. And then once you learn the basic kind of 144 touch points of what his graph was of expression,

then you kind of go, all right, it's gonna kind of be one of those. It's a 76, not an 84. It's a 47, not a 12. And you could kind of approximate. And it was a joy. Even this little thing called the dance of the rolls, where he's got two rolls at the end of two forks, right?

Yeah, it's fantastic. I thought that that was pretty easy, and you do a dance. And then by the time I looked and broke down how he did it, he made it so that it was exactly like the movements of the knee joints because he probably was watching dances on a real stage back in the late 19th century at a dinner theater with roles, and it came out of his own experience

of entertaining people, showing that he could match the dance. Anyway, it was that sort of stuff. By the end of it, I felt like I'd had this transformative experience. I started when I was 26. It came out when I was 26, it came out when I was 27, and I was still 11 years away

from drawing my first truly sober breath, so there were some rude awakenings to come. So through the fog of smoke, you were doing all of this. Yes, I was, and by the way, and I know this has never been your particular challenge, but you've seen it, you know, through and through. And the crazy thing is sometimes it was always done in spite of the self-medication. Sometimes it was done to give ourselves permission to party, even when it had long passed the point of being recreational.

And sometimes there was this wild interplay between the two where the pain of one was informing the joy of the other, and likewise. So you want to talk about efficient. The most efficient thing I can do is be Eddie Cleanhead Vinton because I'm the jazz player who needs to be 1000% accountable for where I am in time and space. Because of that, whatever excellence used to occur in spite of my best efforts, now

it's expectable because I am at the ready, fully functional as I can be, and I have no excuses. Yeah. Not a one. Yeah. So with Chaplin, there's all this expectation of what you have to do to make that character believable as that. Is that a limitation or is that, does that give you more freedom than a character

who nobody knows who they are and you're creating them from scratch? Well, the funny thing is for a while after that, people associated Chaplin's countenance with my physical image. And so you go, my God, in a way, what a great opportunity to be associated with someone who I still to this day look at and go,

maybe one of the great geniuses of all time. And I see him when he was young, and the beauty of him not even knowing what his future was and all the twists and turns. And I'm almost kind of like, I feel like I get to be a little bit of a guardian angel of the sanctity of him. But there came a certain point during the shoot

where I realized I had hit this critical mass and now I was his proxy. And what an honor it was. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. I was actually wrong. Five years earlier, I had played a historic figure that no one ever really knew. Mussolini's son Benito in a TV miniseries with George C. Scott playing Mussolini.

Cool. How was George C. Scott? I'm a fan. Dude. That guy was so badass so talented so in his cups old school But you know cut the line

Wasn't drinking at work But ma'am was that guy of a different era and there was a couple nights where he called me I'm just like go over my room. God. I was like, it's 2 in the morning We got a 7 a.m. Call goes I just flew in from some Stoli from Moscow and pushed the call to 10, get the fuck over here, kid. And he would call me over. We were in Yugoslavia when it was still an Iron Curtain country.

And when he had thrown a few back, he would tell you all the stories about all the great things, and I would of course pick his brain about strange love. And you know, just all the many great all the great things, and I would, of course, pick his brain about strange love and just all the many great things he'd done. He was Patten. He was... He was Patten. He was unbelievable.

Unbelievable. Believe it or not, my dad, senior, used to play on a Broadway baseball league with him. That was the thing. Us Downies were always kind of once removed from the really well-known people, but we knew them in like these kind of... Social...

Yeah, like, you know... social construct settings of, yeah, we're at Central Park, we're playing softball. So cool. With someone like George C. Scott, when between him in the scene and then cut and the guy after, how different was the human versus the guy we see on the screen? Well, he's playing Mussolini, and so I saw him just do a little bit of a tilt towards

this kind of doomed to fake character who had this amazing arc and obviously he was a fascist and so there's all that stuff. And then when the cameras were cut, I was looking at a guy who probably had one of the coolest lives right now that you could imagine having been George C. Scott for a long time going like, what the fuck am I doing in Yugoslavia? You know what I mean? So he was a little bit like, ugh. And he probably hadn't imagined that he'd be doing an NBC miniseries in the third act of his career.

So he was probably a little bummed out. But as a kid, I didn't give a shit. I was just like, bro, it's fucking Patton. This is amazing. Yeah, I didn't give a shit. I was just like, bro, it's fucking Patton. This is amazing. Yeah, I love those. There are 70s mini-series, a bunch of them, that are the coolest things of all. Yeah.

In the same way that when we look back on great movies, they're not in the canon, they're just hidden. Yeah, and that was because, and I think by design, there was this demarcation line that they were not considered art on anywhere near the same level as cinema. So. I grew up watching those, and to this day,

they'll compete with me for whatever the Academy Award-winning movie of the year was. Yeah. Just storytelling so cool, great acting. And sometimes because they were less precious, they have this reality to them that just feels, they're easier to watch in some way. Easier to watch, but even then those artists knew

that they were kind of taking a quick money gig and maybe they knew the director because they'd come out of movies or were going into movies or had done a bunch of reputable other stuff. But it's that weird thing where you're like, wow, wait, maybe in a way they were more free because they were wondering,

ah, should I even trip on this? It's just gonna air. This is just gonna air for a couple of nights. It won't be on a million dollar movie. It will be on those like midnight hours, second run stations. You mentioned John Barrymore earlier. I love John Barrymore, and I never made the connection before, but I feel like you could be in that lineage.

I never would have seen the connection if you didn't bring him up. Yeah. But like 20th century is as good as it gets. Oh, that. So good. And his son Barrymore Jr., who is Drew Barrymore's dad, I got to know him a little bit

and he had that amazing, haunted Richard Harris, kind of just stark, intense beauty of his lineage in very odd circumstances. Back in the mid to late 80s and into the early 90s, right off Topanga, if you went up Topanga, the first left you can hang is this thing called rodeo grounds. And over rodeo grounds, you went over, and, the first left you can hang is this thing called Rodeo Grounds. And over Rodeo Grounds, you went over,

and there was this huge stream, and you have to cross this stream, and I would usually be doing it in a car that shouldn't be crossing a stream. And back there was my friend, this character actor named Michael Green, and a bunch of crazy Topanga Canyon artists, and they had this community back there.

And that's where I would see John Barrymore, Jr. Wow. As a matter of fact, once, I was in my friend Michael Green's kitchen, and right out of this jungle bramble came John Barrymore, Jr. completely in white. But like, he'd been walking through the thickets and stuff. And he just came and he said, put out that cigarette.

And told me to sit down and just engaged with me and thrilled me. And then like he rubbed some olive oil on his arms and put some in his hair right off the table and just walked out. And I was like, bro, was that? And he goes, yeah. JB Jr. stops by a couple times a week.

I was like, wow, dude, I gotta hang out here more. So cool. How would you say your relationship to your day job has changed over the time you've been doing it from then to now? the time you've been doing it from then to now? I almost always felt like I was on the outside looking in and that there were these high functioning systems that I was trying to find a way to be accepted and acknowledged by. And lo, these many years later,

guess who's become part of the establishment? And it's been this really amazing journey where these kind of defeatist projections I had on the man, I realized, wow, it gives me so much empathy for the entirety of mankind, because we're almost always having contempt prior to investigation for things we don't understand or we feel are out of our reach.

So it's been an enlightening, particularly these last five years, finishing out that long run with that stretch of the Marvel contract and falling into not a K-hole, but just enough, what's next? Because once I got there, I thought, this is kind of as good as it gets, but I still want to do other stuff. And then that ran its course, that particular history of it. And the crazy thing is if you stick around, everything comes back around, things become

relevant again, genres become reinvented and numinous to a new audience. And you go, okay, I was kind of here the first time that happened, except it's not like the first time. Now it's being discovered again for a third time by a fourth generation, and you're supposed to host that experience in some way while still putting a twist on it to keep it interesting for yourself. And you go like, wow.

It's fun aging up. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah. Do you ever ad-lib? I love to. I think I'm good at it. It's also funny to me how often people say you're improvising if you say something besides what's written.

To me, ad-libbing is a little different in that you're filling in the blanks with different words. And by filling in the mad lib with a different word than the one you would expect can give it a different context. So I always try to stay within the realm of character and also think about, I don't wanna just be some self-indulgent person

who's like going off script all the time, and there's people who are better at it than me. But I would love to do a project that is very loosely designed and relies almost entirely on improvising along the lines of a pre-designated set of objective. Like, like, Tribute Enthusiasm, for example. Totally.

That'd be super fun for you. Or those Mike Lee films. Like, did you ever see Naked with David Thewlis? No, it was good. Yeah, and Mike Lee is a British director who's renowned for, he'll rehearse things for months and months and months and just kind of talk about them.

And then by the time you do it, there isn't really a script. There's just an extension. A story. Yeah. And you know the story. Yeah, dude. I would love that.

That'd be fun. Tell me about the experience of the project with your dad, the new project with your dad. Well. Had it come to pass? Yes. Well, my dad and I had been looking for projects to do. In fact, at one point we had

this thing called the very special, where we wanted to do some like limited series where I was playing all these crackpot. It's a good name. The very special. And we actually got paid to write some scripts for that, but then they weren't great. And then I think we got sued to give them money back for the scripts. And we were looking for something to do together. My dad was also now diagnosed with Parkinson's. And to be honest, my first impulse was to use it

as a deflection mechanism from really dealing with him. And my dad was always like, oh, the project. So the project wound up becoming this thing that my dad didn't want to deal with, which was doing a documentary about him. And the project became the thing he'd rather do, which is his own deflection. And for me, his son, the whole fucking thing was a deflection. And at a certain point, Chris Smith, the director, Kevin Ford, who was producing, operating, editing, and doing all this other stuff,

and most importantly, my missus, they came in and he said, Robert, this is going to be a god-awful mess. You have to be willing to have this be a very orthodox approach to this unorthodox exploration. It needs to have a fucking beginning, a middle, and an end. Like a three minute song with a four beat count off and a fucking, you can have your bridge

and your instrumental, but this can't be fucking jazz hands. Or this thing that you're trying to make sense of will never make sense to you because you'll never even present it in a way where it can be made sense of and you have to do this by the fucking book. And I go, well, what does that mean? Because your dad only experiences his life through the projects he was doing.

So you have to do a chronological exploration of his projects, and in there, you can ask him about the relationships. Very interesting. And the losses. Very, great idea. And when his wife got sick, and eventually the project is,

how is he going to leave this earth knowing that he has a terminal disease? And she goes, and we don't know how that project's going to go, but you have to show up for it. Yeah. And how was the experience? Whew.

Fuck, dude. Changed my life. Yeah. Did you learn stuff about him you didn't know? I did in that he was very, very, very tied to Long Island and his dad there and these memories he had of normalcy before he became kind of an outcast and then joined the army and then spent half of the time

he was there in the stockade and then came back to New York and somehow or other decided he could be a playwright and then a filmmaker. I didn't know any of that about him. Yeah. Was he like the black sheep of the family? Oh my Lord. I had no idea.

Oh yeah. And when he was speaking of jails and institutions, he was in Alaska on the international dateline at one of these, like, you know, tracking stations. Imagine this. And he, like, jokingly threw a bunch of blips up on the screen and said, oh, my God, and the guy was like, what the fuck, where the end coming? Because I'm just fucking around, and it was like, oh God, thank God, you fucking idiot, and they put him in the stockade. So he was like, pranking nuclear strikes.

You can't make it up. No, he wound up in the stockade, and he said, one of these times, he was like, I'm gonna go to the stockade, and I'm gonna go to the stockade, and I'm gonna go to the stockade, and I'm gonna go to the stockade, and I'm gonna go to the stockade, and I'm gonna go to the stockade, strikes. Can't make it up. No. He bought up in the stockade and he said one of these times he was there, this guy came

in and said, hey, as long as you're here, you may as well do something productive. And he brought my dad a legal pad and a couple of pencils. And it was the kindness of this absolute stranger who probably had no idea whether he was gonna do anything besides write letters to his girlfriend or whatever. And that was where my dad began to think within the context of the confines of being punished for going too far, that maybe he had some other ideas.

Maybe there was other ways to express his desire to disrupt the status quo. And then out of that came this crazy thing. So anyway, here's the weird thing too. The same way I can draw a parallel between my screen test for Chaplin and my screen test for Iron Man. Doing Senior started this whole new five-year chapter

that went through Senior and then being cast in Oppenheimer. And then while we're in post on Oppenheimer, Director Park, who did Oldboy, came and said, I'm doing this Pulitzer book called The Sympathizer about the fall of Saigon and a communist double agent, entire Vietnamese cast, but I would like you to play every white guy in the series. It was their idea for you to play all the characters.

Correct. That's unbelievable. And Susan said, you know what, that's a really good pitch, because you're going to have a hard time turning it down. So I went from senior to Oppenheimer, an exploration of essentially the Cold War and nuclear right into Vietnam era fall of Saigon

and the ramifications therein told in this kind of black comedy fictional way entirely from the point of view of a communist double agent. And it's revolutionized my imaginings about the soup that I was born into, being a Vietnam era kid. And now I find myself at the end of this little triptych, the same way that I had my, on the outside,

it sounded so great. Dude, I'm doing Iron Man, then I'm doing Tropic Thunder, and then I'm doing Sherlock, and I was like, yeah, it was great. I thought, how will I ever, and then this wound up all being these intimate things where- And again, you couldn't have planned it. There's no way, dude.

Couldn't have planned it. No, I just had to be open to not getting frustrated past the point of refusing to understand that it was leading me somewhere. Yeah. Tell me about Tropic Thunder. Oh. Ben directed it, yes?

Dude, yeah. And he is the closest thing that I've ever witnessed to a modern embodiment of a chaplain, because he understands physical comedy, he's a writer-director, his aspirations to do something more dramatic have come to pass the same way that chaplain wanted to bring pathos into cinema. He's got those blue eyes.

I mean, it's so crazy. When I was doing Tropic Thunder, I was kind of going like, this guy's kind of like a modern American version of Chaplin. He kind of does everything. And the crazy thing about Ben is he literally could have been the head of any department on the film he was directing and done a great job.

Because he was at that point in his career where he was at Sifu status. Yeah. And I got to be there with him. Now, the fact that he asked me to do something which since has passed the expiration date of feasibility at the time seemed really daunting, but I knew that as a Jew, as an artist,

as someone who would never want to be overtly a discriminatory or exploitative, it was patently clear to us that where our hearts were. And because our hearts were in such a pure place of wanting to send up the eccentricities of the American white artist, I never in my life more felt like I was wearing a mask that I could speak truth in.

And it wasn't the mask of Lincoln Osiris, it was the mask of Kirk Lazarus, who's playing Lincoln Osiris, who also played. And it was this thing, and so funnily enough, there's a bit of a comparison to be drawn between Tropic Thunder, Vietnam era, and now there's this weird connection with a different objectivity regarding the sympathizer.

And so again, back to your point that we cannot hit home enough. You couldn't make this stuff up. And you're not looking for any of these meta stories. Of course not. You can't be. No, and nor whether you were looking for them or not, it doesn't mean that someone's been developing them

for two years or someone wrote the book seven years ago. It's impossible. No, it's impossible. Exactly, it's only when the bleeding edge of synchronicity is right about to come to a tip and cross only to go off on a trajectory where it may or may not come back around in the slingshot. So yes, that can be comforting,

but then you still have to go execute. It doesn't matter how synchronistic and how the opportunity feels like it's lighting up a constellation of internal associations. It's like, because you know, we've seen people go down that associative rabbit hole and you go, you are soothing yourself to the point of insanity.

And now you're gonna start telling me what every license plate means on every car that passes too, right? Because now you're stuck in an associative loop. The sequential types, or that little sequential part of all of us, and I'm lacking in the sequential department sometimes but I'm a good soldier you know my area is always tight you know my

weapons are clean my pack is ready you know I got my ship by the door and ready to deploy I'm not like some guy that you got to reanimate every morning you know should we talk about Sherlock Holmes sure let we talk about Sherlock Holmes? Sure. Let's talk about Sherlock Holmes. A big turning point for Susan and I in our creative relationship with her producing was Guy Ritchie. I had done Iron Man, I had gone away and done Tropic Thunder and then we go to London and we're doing a Guy Ritchie

steampunk reboot of arguably the most played character in the history of film and television. And what to do. So I leaned back a little bit into the chaplain education. At this point, I've been doing kung fu for about three and a half years and was had a pretty good working knowledge of the basics and then entered Jude Law who I saw again recently and there was just something about he and I

the creative partner he is the fact that even when he came for the meeting before he signed on, every gal and half the guys on team down, he were, like, peering out, sneaking out in the hallway to see him walk by. He just has this draw to him. And then Guy Ritchie directed us in what turned out to be a really kind of visceral reinvention of that kind of 19th century thing.

And it was great. Would you watch all the different iterations or is that not necessary? To read the books? Absolutely went deep on the books. Jeremy Brett did a fantastic series in the 80s, but then, you know, Elementary and the other Sherlock TV show,

like sometimes you go like, so many folks are doing this so smart. It was great. The Sherlock TV series is great. Bananas. It's great. Yeah. Ridiculous.

Yeah, like hard to match how smart the writing was. In fact, they did such a good job that it's kind of crippled us in trying to figure out how to do a third one that could hold up to all of the great Sherlock material out there. And then that's my boy, you know, Benedict. Yeah, amazing. Cumberbatch did such a great job.

But the main thing was going overseas and being force-fed the British civilized approach to making a $150 million dollar action franchise is something that we adopted, adapted and have brought into every production since. In other words, us Americans, hey, you know, this weekend we gotta get together at the grind and they'd be like, no, no, no, hold on, Rob, hold on. Why don't you get some cheese and bring some food in,

maybe folks who wanna come out tonight. Don't be a cunt, Rob. You know, and they'd be like, whoa. And they're also more efficient as well. Yes. Both. Big time. And that is the key word for Guy Ritchie,

is to him the highest praise you could give him is Master of efficiency. Yeah so That happened these fight sequences half the time. We would kind of be building them two or three moves at a time He's a black belt jujitsu guy. I was on the rise So we had that whole kind of thing going. Jude is as capable as they come with stage combat and all that stuff, so we had a blast. There was one scene, I think the guy's name was Robert Gellay.

He was Canadian. He played this character, Dredger. There's a scene where this guy who's as tall as a doorframe comes in, and we wind up having this fight sequence. And we had a couple shots left, and we were doing that thing of kind of choreography, not, you don't improvise choreography, but I was like, what if I did this, and then I'll do a release,

and I'll come with a lopsided punch, and you come with another thing, and I'll block it there, how about that? And he was like, yes, I think I can do this. And it was like, all right, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, five, come with the lopsided punch, you come with another thing and I'll block it there. How about that? And he was like, yes, I think I can do this. And it was like, all right, five, four, three, two. This is what Guy Ritchie would do

when he was tired of waiting. Five, four, and everyone scrambles. Three, rolling sound. Two, positions, one, action. That's how he got it done. Five, four, three, two, one. action. Wow. That's how he got it done. Five, four, three, two, one. That's awesome. Bananas.

Awesome. But he came in a little quick on the five for me because I was still talking to Big Robert about how to do this. But you knew where. And I was like, you got it, you got it. He goes, yes, do you have it? I was like, yeah, I got it, but I didn't.

And so we went and he goes, boom, pteesh, boom, pteesh, pteteesh, boom, p-teesh, p-teesh. I go, ha-ha, boom, boom. And his hand was the size of a cantaloupe. I saw flashes of light, I heard orchestral music, and the next thing I knew, I was lucky, where I'd gotten a hand out, and I was down on the ground,

and the poor guy was mortified. I wanted to buy him a bottle of champagne. And this was the turning point with me and Guy Ritchie. He goes, ah, cut. And he looks at me and goes, rope. And inside of my mouth, I just ripped open. One of my teeth is wobbling. I'm just gushing blood.

And I go, can you shoot something for an hour while I go get this stitched up? He goes, yep, all right, moving on. He goes, but you'll come back, right, yeah? I go, yeah. He goes, ah, that's my boy. And so I was like, get me out of here.

We went to a place, they numbed it, they stitched it back up. I came back, I finished the day, and it was that day that Guy Ritchie realized that was not some Hollywood putz. And we were gonna have a good time. And that was another beautiful... Amazing. And the show must go on.

Oh, boy, mustn't it. You've been lauded and reviled in the culture. Yeah. And can you remain in the center of you regardless of the outside noise? Most days, yes. Love and marriage, I can't have one without the other. It's all true. And if I'm just okay with even the stuff that'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not gonna lie to you.

I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not gonna lie to you.

I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not gonna defend when it comes to the opinions of others that I can't control anyway, I'm so free. And so even recently, like dude, I got the best reviews of my entire career and then in a few things that have happened since or maybe a misstep or my project after that, of course, there's some people who wanna go, but he ruined the next or whatever,

and just go, you know what? Yeah, it's all true Look at the end of either of our IMDb's Yes, you have who we are and what we've done. Yep, and then you have the counterpoints You know why we're both fucking complete assholes And I go ah The defense rests. Yeah, I got nothing for you as a matter of fact The defense rests. I got nothing for you.

As a matter of fact, what did we call it? The fizzle reel. I'm not spending enough time embracing the fizzle reel because the truth that is or isn't in there, it's a great starting point because then the only way is out, brother. And it's fun. It's fun, dude.

It's fun, it's all okay. It is okay. Yeah. I love the game. The game is beautiful, the game is complex, the game is the towel. And if you understand the towel, you're never playing a game that you win or lose.

You're only ever playing a game that you know how to play. And the worst part of life is when you don't know how to play the game. Because then you're never really on the field, you're never really on a level playing field, you're always playing catch up, you're always getting slammed, you're always on the sidelines,

and you're, everything's a fucking Hail Mary. You know, that is defeat. And yet, as you know, there's levels to this game. Which level are you playing, my kind friend? Speaking of the Hail Mary, do you believe in God? I believe in good orderly direction, and I believe that there is nothing but evidence of a creative intelligence at play. Thank you.