Robert Downey Jr. Defends ‘Tropic Thunder’ Against Backlash, Compares It To Norman Lear’s Sitcom ‘All in The Family’

Robert Downey Jr. has continued to defend the controversial 2008 comedy Tropic Thunder, in which he played a method actor wearing Blackface for a role.

Speaking to Rob Lowe on his podcast Literally, Downey maintained that the film was meant to criticize tropes they were seeing in Hollywood at the time.

“The spirit that [Ben] Stiller directed and cast and shot Tropic Thunder in was, essentially, as a railing against all of these tropes that are not right and [that] had been perpetuated for too long,” Downey said, per Entertainment Weekly.

He also compared the film to Norman Lear‘s 1970s sitcom All in the Family, which included a disclaimer in each of its episodes that Downey says relates to the intentions they had with Tropic Thunder. The actor said viewers should reacquaint themselves with the disclaimer, as it could act as “an antidote to this clickbait addiction to grievance that [people seem] to have with everything these days.”

As EW noted in their reporting, the full disclaimer included in All in the Family reads: “The program you are about to see is All in the Family. It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to show — in a mature fashion — just how absurd they are.”

“The language was saying, ‘Hey, this is the reason that we’re doing these things that, in a vacuum, you could pick apart and say are wrong and bad,’” Downey said on the podcast. “There used to be an understanding with an audience, and I’m not saying that the audience is no longer understanding — I’m saying that things have gotten very muddied.” 

This isn’t the first time the actor has defended the film. In a 2020 interview with Joe Rogan, he said, “It was impossible to not have it be an offensive nightmare of a movie, and 90 percent of my Black friends are like, ‘Dude, that was great.’”

Though he went back and forth on his decision to star in the movie, Downey said he ultimately decided to listen to his “heart.”

“My heart is, a) I get to be black for a summer in my mind, so there’s something in it for me,” he said at the time. “The other thing is, I get to hold up to nature the insane self-involved hypocrisy of artists and what they think they’re allowed to do on occasion — just my opinion.”

Stiller similarly stood by the 2008 comedy, saying he is still “proud of it and the work everyone did on it.”