Robert Downey Jr. wears blackface to mock white actors who wear blackface?
by Carmen Van Kerckhove
Fatemeh and reader Nae tipped us off to this upcoming Ben Stiller comedy, in which Robert Downey Jr. appears in blackface.
But wait - his character is a white actor who dons blackface to play a role that was originally written for a black man. So… is this a way of skewering the Angelina Jolie’s of the world?
Here’s a piece from Entertainment Weekly:
If you don’t recognize that African-American actor standing between Jack Black and Ben Stiller, there’s a good reason: He’s white. In Tropic Thunder, an epic action comedy co-written and directed by Stiller, Robert Downey Jr. plays Kirk Lazarus, a very serious Oscar-winning actor cast in the most expensive Vietnam War film ever. Problem is, Lazarus’s character, Sgt. Osiris, was originally written as black. So Lazarus decides to dye his skin and play Osiris, um, authentically. Funny? Sure. Dangerous? That’s an understatement. ”If it’s done right, it could be the type of role you called Peter Sellers to do 35 years ago,” Downey says. ”If you don’t do it right, we’re going to hell.”
…For starters, Hollywood satires have a rocky box office record. And then there’s that little issue of a white guy playing a black guy. Stiller says that he and Downey always stayed focused on the fact that they were skewering insufferable actors, not African-Americans. ”I was trying to push it as far as you can within reality,” Stiller explains. ”I had no idea how people would respond to it.” He recently screened a rough cut of the film and it scored high with African-Americans. He was relieved at the reaction. ”It seems people really embrace it,” he says.
Paramount is hoping so: The studio plans to debut the trailer online March 17, and Downey is all over it. (In one scene, he tries to bond with a real African-American castmate by quoting the theme song from The Jeffersons.) Downey, meanwhile, is confident he never crossed the line. ”At the end of the day, it’s always about how well you commit to the character,” he says. ”I dove in with both feet. If I didn’t feel it was morally sound, or that it would be easily misinterpreted that I’m just C. Thomas Howell in [Soul Man], I would’ve stayed home.”
Huh. Funny that Downey would invoke Peter Sellers.
Okay, the idea of mocking white actors who put on blackface in this day and age seems like a good one, if this whole movie is satirizing Hollywood. But dude, it’s a Ben Stiller movie. As much as I enjoy catching cable reruns of Zoolander (”one look??”), I can’t see this movie doing anything but bungling the race issue.
What do you all think?
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
Tropic Thunder trailer: what do you think? at Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture on 19 Mar 2008 at 7:35 am
[…] trailer for the new Ben Stiller comedy we discussed last week, starring Robert Downey Jr. as a white actor who puts on blackface to play a role originally […]
Iron Man isn’t Propaganda. Woo! « alicia dk on 06 May 2008 at 1:05 pm
[…] I was relieved to really enjoy it. Robert Downey Jr. is perfect in the role, but he has to prove himself to me once again soon. […]