Robert Downey Jr’s Multiple Roles In ‘The Sympathizer’ Represent “America As A Whole,” Director Park Chan-Wook Reveals
deadline.comSPOILER ALERT: This article contains details of the first episode of HBO‘s limited series The Sympathizer, which premiered on April 14. “All right, see you stateside,” says Robert Downey Jr’s Claude quips with some gallows humor to Hoa Xuande’s The Captain near the end of the first episode of HBO’s The Sympathizer as communist North Vietnamese forces bombard soon-to-fall Saigon in 1975.
If the slippery CIA officer was the only role Oscar winner Downey portrays in the Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar co-showrunned multi-genre adaptation ofViet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, it would capture a lot of attention on or off cable.
However, the fact is Downey plays several characters in multi-cultural and multi-national The Sympathizer as the action moves from the dying days of the American War as it is known in Southeast Asia, to southern California and back again.
Along with the music fan spymaster and mentor to the Captain, the actor also pops up as a scheming Congressman, an grad school professor and self-absorbed Hollywood director seeking to make the definitive movie in the Vietnam War.
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