Robert Downey Jr has spoken out and defended the 2008 film Tropic Thunder after he received backlash for wearing a blackface.
The Ben Stiller movie, which also starred Tom Cruise, Jack Black and Jay Baruchel, follows a group of actors who were shooting a war film.
Like his co-stars, Robert transformed into a Black man as he played a character named Kirk Lazarus.
The movie won the Critics Choice Movie Award for Best Comedy in 2009.
However, Tropic Thunder has been facing backlash for numerous reasons, including the depiction of minority groups and people with disability, as well as the way a non-black actor used makeup to represent a Black person.
In 2020, the Iron Man star said that ’90 percent of his Black friends’ thought that the film was ‘great.’
“Ben Stiller knew exactly what the vision for this was, he executed it, it was impossible to not have it be an offensive nightmare of a movie,” he expressed.
During a recent appearance on Rob Lowe’s Literally! podcast, Robert said: “I was looking back at ‘All in the Family,’ and they had a little disclaimer that they were running at the beginning of the show.
“People should look it up, exactly what it is, because it is an antidote to this clickbait addiction to grievance that [people seem] to have with everything these days.”
He continued: “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,’” adding that audience used to understand the story but now “things have gotten very muddied.”
The actor also praised the director for fighting “against all these tropes that are not right and (that) had been perpetuated for too long.”
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