Get the latest gossip

Robert Downey Jr. Likens His Role in ‘Oppenheimer’ to ‘Picking Fly Sh*t Out of Pepper’

Robert Downey Jr. joked that the precise experience of collaborating with Christopher Nolan was like "picking fly shit out of pepper."

“I knew that playing Strauss, in ‘Oppenheimer,’ was going to be like picking fly shit out of pepper — that it was going to be extremely exacting, that it was going to be … not confining, but liberating by its varied implicit limitations of what my usual toolbox is,” Downey said. Downey plays all of the major white men on the series, including a brash CIA operative and a Hollywood director, as a way of illustrating the way that their interests are fundamentally aligned no matter how superficially different they might seem. “Here, he plays no less than four roles, all of whom form their own relationship with the Captain, and all of whom represent a distinctly American blend of arrogance, charm, and power,” IndieWire’s Ben Travers wrote in his review of the series.

Get the Android app