After Cate Blanchett’s icy response to one interviewer during her Cinderella promotion blitzkrieg, you might have thought you would see a dip in hyper-reactive celebrities during probing tête-à-têtes about their latest films. Robert Downey Jr., however, has proven the relative calm after Hurricane Blanchett to be short-lived.
Downey Jr.’s latest interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy, a British TV journalist for Channel 4, finds him irritated and bristled over Guru-Murthy’s attempt at poignancy by comparing the character of Tony Stark to Downey Jr. himself due to their “dark pasts.”
Whether or not one feels Guru-Murthy was out of bounds in his line of questioning is not the point of the issue at hand, which is the diva-rific nature of celebrities whose job it is to answer questions about their projects, even if they don’t see the point of making analogies between characters and themselves. Nonetheless, to retaliate against the queries he felt slighted by, Downey Jr. got up and balked, “It’s just getting a little Diane Sawyer in here.”
It is outbursts like these that make one wonder if actors are worthy of the position and responsibility they’ve been given. If it’s so difficult to deal with “annoying” questions about themselves, which one would think might appeal to their ego, then where do the challenges of their job lie? Because there have to be some in order to outweigh the many perks of the profession (mostly material), lest an all-out civilian mutiny against the celebrity echelon is organized.
