With His Upcoming Debut, Robert Downey Jr. Is Finally Joining the Avengers of Broadway

Iron Man is rocketing to Broadway. Well, the Oscar-winning actor Robert Downey Jr. is coming to Broadway, at any rate. In September, the charm-oozing, fast-talking actor is set to make his debut in McNeal, a new play by Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar about a great novelist with, according to the synopsis, a fascination with artificial intelligence. (Echoes of Tony Stark’s own fraught relationship with the technology are, surely, purely coincidental.)

After having spent more than 10 years, on and off, clunking around the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a gold-titanium suit—Hollywood's version of indentured servitude these days—it seems like Downey has been creatively unleashed. He recently gave an Academy Award-winning performance in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and even more recently physically transformed for multiple roles in HBO’s The Sympathizer. For him to be making his Broadway debut is the latest reassuring indication yet that, after a spectacular and lucrative detour, Downey the serious actor is truly back—and perhaps ready to make up for lost time.

The actor kick-started what became known as the M.C.U. in 2008’s Iron Man—relaunching his career, famously derailed by addiction, in the process. But when it comes to the actors behind The Avengers, he’s a relative latecomer to the Broadway stage.

Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Avengers founder Nick Fury, was, appropriately, the first to debut on Broadway, serving as an understudy in August Wilson's The Piano Lesson in 1990. Having conquered Hollywood, he returned to Broadway in 2011 to play Martin Luther King Jr. in The Mountaintop, and was back again in 2022 for the Broadway revival of The Piano Lesson—this time in a starring role. He picked up a Tony nomination for the performance.

Before he was Bruce Banner and The Hulk, Mark Ruffalo burst onto the Broadway stage in 2006 in Awake and Sing! (a production also helmed by McNeal director Bartlett Sher), having previously originated the character of Warren in Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth off-Broadway a decade prior. Chris Evans made his Broadway debut playing a cop in another Lonergan play, Lobby Hero, in 2018, swapping his Captain America helmet for a crowd-pleasing moustache.

Bradley Cooper, who voices Rocket, a genetically modified raccoon with attitude in the Guardians of the Galaxy films, debuted on Broadway in 2006's Three Days of Rain, returning to play the stoically disfigured Joseph Merrick in 2014's The Elephant Man. Cooper earned a Tony nom for that performance, but Scarlett Johansson is the only Avenger thus far to have actually won an acting Tony, having made her Broadway debut in 2010—the same year she was inducted into the M.C.U. as Black Widow—in Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge, opposite Liev Schreiber. ("Ms. Johansson melts into her character so thoroughly that her nimbus of celebrity disappears," the New York Times gushed.)

The Avenger with the most impressive theatrical bona fides? Before he portrayed the shrinking superhero Ant-Man and explored the quantum realm, Paul Rudd made his New York stage debut in Neil LaBute’s Bash in 1996. He followed that up with Broadway's The Last Night of Ballyhoo, co-starred with Cooper in Three Days of Rain and, most recently, starred in Craig Wright’s Grace in 2012, acting alongside Michael Shannon. In the West End, Rudd has also performed in Long Day’s Journey into Night with Jessica Lange. (Before all that, he played "Good Macbeth" in an experimental Macbeth in college.)

While he hasn’t appeared on a New York stage as yet, Marvel’s latest Peter Parker/Spider-Man Tom Holland made his West End debut at the age of 12, playing a supporting part in Billy Elliot before being promoted to the lead role. This month, he begins performances in Jamie Lloyd’s Romeo & Juliet, a production speculated to be Broadway-bound.

By contrast, Downey has spent relatively little time on the boards. He made his stage debut at age 17 in Alms for the Middle Class at Geva Theatre Center in Rochester—a 15-year-old Philip Seymour Hoffman sat rapt in the audience one night—and had a number of off-Broadway roles. But Hollywood, and all its vices, beckoned early.

There’s every indication that Downey will command the Broadway stage. From Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Soapdish to Tropic Thunder, he has lived up to one critic’s description of him as “the quickest, sharpest, slyest and wryest comic actor on the screen.” For all his disarming sarcasm and humor, his screen performances often radiate with a taut, dangerous intensity—a quality Nolan tapped into for Oppenheimer. In films like The Judge, Zodiac and Chaplin, though, he’s displayed a remarkable capacity for depth and grace.

Amidst the C.G. murk and overeager pyrotechnics, plenty of Downey’s actual brilliance shone through in the Marvel movies, especially in the early Iron Man entries. Certainly, he frequently gave the impression that he was having a rollicking time. But it was a tragedy for screen acting as an art form that a performer of such dynamism and kineticism as Downey was, for large swathes of those culture-dominating movies, little more than a head in a fishbowl.

The stage of the Vivian Beaumont Theater is the opposite of that—a sprawling 11,000 square-foot playground where Downey can stretch out, prowl around and whoop some metaphorical but non-C.G. ass.

In an interview with the New York Times in 2023, Downey talked about regaining his “connection with a more purist approach to making movies.” It's a gift for New York theater audiences that the actor's rediscovered sense of purism led him inexorably to the live stage.

And, who knows? Maybe Chris Hemsworth will be next.