entertainer of the year 2008 - part 3

Sitting down for a conversation with Downey is a little like that scene in Iron Man when Tony Stark slips into his jet-powered boots for the first time. It zooms wildly all over the place, veering from a discussion about whether he should have grown a mustache for Sherlock HolmesIron Man comic books (''If you ask me, Tony Stark looked like Schneider from One Day at a Time''). It can be a bumpy, if thrilling, ride. (''I tried, but everyone thought I looked like Super Mario'') to his first impressions of the Iron Man comic books (''If you ask me, Tony Stark looked like Schneider from One Day at a Time''). It can be a bumpy, if thrilling, ride.

When the talk lands on his career, he reveals that he had hoped for an earlier comeback, with Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, a savvy, twisty 2005 crime caper costarring Val Kilmer that never found an audience. ''It was going to be my coming-out party, my emergence into 21st-century cinema,'' Downey says, laughing. ''When it tanked, I was heartbroken.'' On the bright side, it did get noticed by director Jon Favreau, who happened to be looking for an actor to play a certain weapons-manufacturing magnate with a thing for Black Sabbath. Downey wanted Iron Man so badly he spent three weeks compulsively rehearsing every conceivable line reading for his audition. ''I had amendments and ancillaries and pop-ups for every part of the scene — if it went off in one direction I could add A, B, or C. It was madness,'' he says, ''but also the most positively reinforced ritual I've ever performed. If Aleister Crowley had a younger brother — it was that type of s---.''

Nabbing the part of the heavy metal fellow was only the beginning of Downey's karmic turnaround. Just before he started shooting Iron Man in March 2007, Stiller — who says he was looking for a ''real actor'' for the part, not a ''comedy guy'' — offered him the role in Tropic Thunder of Kirk Lazarus, an Australian Method actor who undergoes pigment alteration so that he can play an African-American soldier in a big Hollywood blockbuster about Vietnam (''I'm the dude playing the dude disguised as another dude,'' Downey says, quoting a line from the film). The part was so loopy and potentially tasteless — blackface remains the third rail of American comedy — he couldn't resist; he flew to Hawaii to start shooting it in July 2007, two weeks after finishing production on Iron Man. ''It took a lot of courage,'' Stiller says of Downey's dedication to the role. ''I mean, think about it. He had to come to the set every day in full black makeup and play this over-the-top character. Most of the crew hadn't read the script. Nobody knew what was going on. And here comes this white guy in blackface doing the Jeffersons theme song.''