Christopher Nolan Admits ‘I Was a Little Afraid’ of Robert Downey Jr. When They First Met for ‘Batman Begins’ Because ‘I’d Heard Stories About How Crazy’ He Was
variety.comZack Sharf Digital News Director Robert Downey Jr. made headlines earlier this month when he revealed that he first met his “Oppenheimer” director Christopher Nolan back in the early 2000s in order to nab the role of Scarecrow in the director’s 2005 superhero tentpole “Batman Begins.” Downey said Nolan wasn’t too interested in casting him, which Nolan fully admitted in a recent interview with the actor for The New York Times. “I 100% knew you weren’t the guy [for Scarecrow],” said Nolan, who eventually cast his “Oppenheimer” leading man Cillian Murphy as the Batman villain. “In my head that was already cast.
But I always wanted to meet you…I was a huge admirer of yours and therefore selfishly just wanted to take the meeting. But I was also a little afraid of you, you know.
I had heard all kinds of stories about how you were crazy. It was only a few years after the last of those stories that had come out about you.” Nolan and Downey’s first meeting was well before Marvel cast the actor as Iron Man, which led to Downey’s career being completely revived after a series of legal troubles made him a Hollywood outcast through the turn of the century.
The actor was arrested in 1996 for possession of heroin, cocaine and an unloaded gun and given three years of probation. He was then jailed for nearly four months a year later after skipping a court-ordered drug test.
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