Robert Downey Jr. is confident Marvel would not create an AI likeness of him

Robert Downey Jr. had a clear answer when asked about AI recently.

“There’s two tracks,” he said this month on the podcast On with Kara Swisher. “How do I feel about everything that’s going on? I feel about it minimally because I have an actual emotional life that’s occurring that doesn’t have a lot of room for that.”

His answer was more specific when it came to Marvel, the brand behind his Iron Man movies.

“To go back to the MCU,” he said, “I am not worried about them hijacking my character’s soul, because there’s like three or four guys and gals who make all the decisions there anyway, and they would never do that to me, with or without me.”

Swisher insisted that “future executives certainly will” want to exploit his image. One of the things actors demanded in last year’s strike was guardrails against artificial intelligence.

Downey agreed.

“And I would like to here state that I intend to sue all future executives,” he said. “Just on spec.”

When Swisher gently noted that Downey, 59, would be dead, the actor joked that his law firm would “still be very active.”

RDJ starred in three Iron Man movies and franchise projects such as The Avengers and its sequels, until he met a heroic but sad demise in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. But he’s now set to return to the MCU as a different character, the villainous Dr. Doom, in 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday and as well as Avengers: Secret Wars in 2027.

Even his former Iron Man costar Gwyneth Paltrow, who played Pepper Potts, seemed confused about his status, commenting on his Instagram post about the announcement: “I don’t get it, are you a baddie now?”

Downey himself put it this way at 2024’s San Diego Comic-Con: “New mask, same task. What can I say, I like playing complicated characters.”

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