Channel 4 Journalist Out of Line With RDJ

Everyone knows Robert Downey Jr. has a less than pleasant past. He acted out often. He did a lot of drugs. He got in trouble several times and even went to jail for it. The 50-year-old actor’s past has been re-hashed by numerous news outlets.

Fans like Igor Cornelsen know that he has also spent a large portion of his life trying to rebuild from that past and doing so, as many believe, very successfully not only professionally through his role as Tony Stark/Iron Man in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe but also on a personal level.

Imagine his surprise when British TV journalist Krishnan Guru-Murthy brought it up again during a Channel 4 interview designed to promote Avengers: Age of Ultron. Guru-Murthy deviated from the agreed upon interview script to ask if RDJ might feel that he was slipping back into his past drug abuse behaviors. RDJ gave several verbal and body cues that indicated he was uncomfortable with this line of questioning, but Guru-Murthy persisted and RDJ walked out.

As RDJ’s supporters have pointed out, he did nothing wrong. Guru-Murthy went too far and even seemed to be enjoying the fact that he had made the actor uncomfortable — as indicated by his grinning as RDJ left. This is not Guru-Murthy’s first attempt to create scandal from an interview designed to promote a film. He did the same to Quentin Tarantino during a Django Unchained promotional interview.