8 Little Known Tics That Made Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man Perfect

5. He Leaves The Serious Stuff To Other Characters

Tony Stark was a ground-breaking superhero back in 2008, because far away from the seriousness of Batman or earnestness of Spider-Man, he couldn't really be nailed down as a straight character. Roger Ebert put it best when he said, "Some superheroes speak in a kind of heightened, semi-formal prose, as if dictating to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Not Tony Stark. Iron Man doesn't seem to know how seriously most superhero movies take themselves. If there is wit in the dialog, the superhero is often supposed to be unaware of it...What happens in Iron Man, however, is that sometimes we wonder how seriously even Stark takes it. He's flippant in the face of disaster, casual on the brink of ruin." Even when disaster strikes, Downey's delivery and lightness of touch keeps things fun, largely because both Stark and Downey know that the seriousness is better left to Cap, who by this point is simply more believable as a straight-laced character. Downey, by contrast, downplays serious situations for the most part and imbues them with scathing wit and humour instead. When he's saved in Iron Man, he's all about cheeseburgers first, he breaks out the iconic shawarma line after almost falling to his death in The Avengers and the marketing for Iron Man 3 made it look like the darkest Marvel movie yet, but by the time the edit was complete, Stark's gags ran rampant over it. And, finally, there's the trailers for Captain America: Civil War, which clearly already has Downey lightening the load by playing up the humour in lines like "sometimes I want to punch you in your perfect teeth".