Robert Downey Jr. can safely say he’d do another Marvel movie, because it probably won’t happen

With the MCU fully in its flop era after the box office failures of films like The Marvels and Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania, a lot of former Marvel stars have been choosing their words pretty carefully when asked the inevitable “would you ever return” interview question. Last week, Zoe Saldaña said she thought it “would be a huge loss for Marvel if they didn’t find a way to bring back the Guardians of the Galaxy,” but that her time as Gamora was “gone for good.” Last summer, Age Of Ultron star Aaron Taylor Johnson said he straight up “didn’t really care for” his multiple franchise roles, even though he’ll be returning (in a way) to play Kraven the Hunter in Sony’s Spider-Man spinoff later this year.

Robert Downey Jr. took a slightly different tack. “Happily,” he said, when Esquire asked whether he’d ever consider stepping into Iron Man’s shiny red boots one more time. “It’s too integral a part of my DNA,” he continued. “That role chose me. And look, I always say, Never, ever bet against (Marvel Studios CEO) Kevin Feige. It is a losing bet. He’s the house. He will always win.”

Here’s the thing: have you ever said you would have loved to attend a friend of a friend of a friend’s birthday party an hour from you after you’d already RSVPd no? That’s essentially what Downey is doing here. Speaking years after Tony Stark’s death at the end of Avengers: Endgame, Feige promised Vanity Fair, “We are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again… We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way.” Added director Joe Russo, “We promised [Downey] it would be the last time we made him do it—ever.”

On the other hand, Downey may have just been feeling nostalgic for his days of uninterrupted riffing after working on Oppenheimer, which he described to Esquire as “like picking fly shit out of pepper… liberating by its varied implicit limitations of what my usual toolbox is.” That’s a stark contrast to what he used to do on his Marvel sets. In the same profile, Gwyneth Paltrow revealed that she stopped trying to learn her lines altogether while working alongside the actor. “There would be this process of [director] Jon Favreau and Robert and I going into Jon’s trailer in the morning and Robert being like, ‘I’m not fucking saying these lines’ and throwing them out,” she said. “I think in order for something to feel alive for Robert, it has to feel fresh, and he makes it fresh by making it feel like it was just invented. So many of those famous lines were written ten minutes before we said them.”

Downey’s next project is Vietnam War thriller The Sympathizer, which he executive produced with Oldboy director Park Chan-wook. The miniseries premieres April 12 on HBO.