Robert Downey Jr. wins Best Supporting Actor for ‘Oppenheimer’ at Oscars 2024: ‘I’d like to thank my terrible childhood’
Robert Downey Jr. is finally an Oscar winner.
The 58-year-old “Oppenheimer” star took home the Best Supporting Actor Oscar at the 96th Academy Awards, presentedlive from the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday.
“I’d like to thank my terrible childhood and the Academy in that order,” Downey joked during his acceptance speech.
“I’d like to thank my veterinarian — I mean my wife, Susan Downey, over there. She found me a snarling rescue pet and you love me back to life. That’s why I’m here,” he sweetly acknowledged his bride of 22 years.
In the Christopher Nolan-directed film, Downey portrays Lewis Strauss: a businessman who played a major role in the development of the atomic bomb and later became a political rival of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy).
“Oppenheimer” led the 2024 Oscar nominations with 13 nods, followed by “Poor Things” with 11. The film’s box office rival, “Barbie,” was up for eight golden statues.
“I needed this job more than it needed me,” Downey said of “Oppenheimer” on Sunday.
“Chris [Nolan] knew it. Emma [Thomas] made sure she surrounded me with one of the greatest cast and crews of all time: Emily [Blunt], Cillian [Murphy], Matt Damon. It was fantastic and I stand here before you a better man because of it.”
Downey is a two-time Oscar nominee, losing his first Best Actor nod, for “Chaplin,” to Al Pacino for “Scent of a Woman” in 1993.
In a January appearance on “The View,” Downey, who famously served jail time for drug use several years after his first nomination, said he was glad he lost out on Oscar the first time, because winning would’ve given him a false sense of success.
“I was young and crazy,” he said, adding that an Oscar win at 28 years old “would have put me under the impression that I was on the right track.”
He received a second Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actor for “Tropic Thunder” in 2009, making “Oppenheimer” his third nod.
The 2024 award season has delivered an abundance of riches for the Marvel actor.
First, he scored a Golden Globe for “Oppenheimer,” praising his wife and “primary caregiver” Susan, 50, in his acceptance speech.
“[She] literally made an art out of extracting me from my comfort zone,” he said at the time. “But she’s easy on the eyes, so whatevs.”
He also won for at the SAG Awards, joking onstage, “Unlike my fellow nominees, I will never grow tired from the sound of my own voice.”
He again used the platform to shout-out Susan.
“For 22 years, she has flawlessly portrayed a sane and rational individual who is happily married to an actor,” Downey quipped.
“Oppenheimer” also stars Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon and Josh Hartnett.
Blunt, who previously worked with director Nolan on “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Interstellar,” revealed in Variety’s “Actors on Actors“ that she warned Downey about Nolan’s British approach to giving positive reinforcement and affirmations.
“I remember when I first met Robert Downey Jr., I said, ‘You’re going to just love it so much and the screws are going to get tightened on you so much and it’s just the most focused, wonderful, unchaotic set. But you’re going to get some very British compliments,'” Blunt recalled.
“‘There will be no smoke blown up your ass and you’re going to have to be alright with it.'”
Meanwhile, Murphy gushed to GQ in July about Downey’s astounding professionalism.
“A lot of the scenes I have with Downey, it was quite loose and quite improvisational,” the “Peaky Blinders” alum said. “I mean, acting with him was just extraordinary. He’s just electrifying, the most available, engaged, present, unpredictably brilliant actor I’ve ever worked with.”
In January, Downey told W Magazine that the film “was really a leap of faith with Chris.”
“Everything about playing Lewis Strauss was … I don’t want to say difficult, but it was counterintuitive for me. I know that we’re all mixtures of what our persona is and who we really are,” Downey explained.
“Nolan was inviting me to turn the mirror onto an unexplored portion of myself. And the character, to me, is everybody who has ever felt slighted by somebody who was more important than them. It gave me a lot of time to reflect. I wondered if I’ve come off like that to people in the past. And I wondered if I were them, if I wouldn’t seek to destroy me.”
