Robert Downey Jr. struggled with addiction for years. In the documentary “Sr.”, the homage to his late father, he talks about how it all began. The father gave the initial spark.
Actor Robert Downey Jr. and drug addiction are no strangers. At the end of the 90s it even got him in jail. In the Netflix documentary “Sr”, a homage to Robert Downey Senior, Downey Jr. now deals with his own addiction, but also with his father’s. Because it was he who introduced him to drugs in the first place – at the tender age of six.
It’s a story father Robert Downey Sr. was not afraid to tell even while he was alive. At the turn of the millennium, he admitted in an interview with “Vanity Fair” that it was he who gave his son his first joint. The son had just drunk white wine when the father intervened. But instead of taking the alcohol away from the six-year-old, he substituted one drug for another – marijuana. “I said, ‘You know, you should try some of this instead of drinking.’ I handed him a joint and suddenly I knew I’d made a terrible, stupid mistake,” he said. An act that he will never forgive himself.
“Things got out of hand”
The documentation also goes into more detail about what happened. What’s shown is old footage of what appears to be Robert Downey Sr. in the late ’90s as he talks about how many at the time thought “it would be hypocritical not to let our kids have access to marijuana and stuff like that. So we thought it was cute to let them smoke.” That was idiotic.
The senior also struggled with addiction. The effects of this addiction on the son are discussed, but details are left out. “It’s a disease,” he told Downey Jr. in an interview with Deadline. And: “I don’t know if my father ever made his peace with these many lost years.”
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Robert Downey Jr. himself struggled with his addiction for years. More than others, he looks back and thinks it’s shocking that even a single film has been completed. For him, at the time, it was just a game “about calming yourself down or staying full, rather than dealing with the fact that things had gotten a little out of hand.”
Robert Downey Jr. brought the addiction to Cell 17 at California State Prison. At that time he had to serve three years for drug possession. In 2003 the actor finally managed to leave his addiction behind.
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