16 Robert Downey Jr. Movies (and One TV Show) You Need to Watch

One of RDJ’s most notable early roles—he was credited only as “Robert Downey” here—is as a jock named Ian in the John Hughes film Weird Science. The movie is about two friends who are also computer nerds and accidentally create a dream woman, who helps them stand up to annoyances like Ian. Weird Science isn’t anywhere near the best John Hughes movie, but it’s quite fun to look back and see one of our most unique stars standing out early on.

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Another early Downey Jr. role came in the Rodney Dangerfield comedy classic Back to School, when he played the roommate and only friend of Dangerfield’s son. Pretty standard role, but good, funny movie! If you haven’t seen it, certainly worth your time (and you’ll get quite a few laughs out of it)

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Downey Jr.’s roles started getting meatier by the late ’80s, and one of the better ones came in True Believer, where he played a young lawyer named Roger who comes to work with a jaded but talented attorney played by James Woods. This is a very solid legal thriller that gave audiences an early look at what RDJ can do.

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Richard Attenborough directed Downey Jr. in Chaplin, which explored the full life of one of the world-renowned silent film star. This became the signature role for the early part of his career, earning him his first Oscar nomination and a BAFTA win. 1990 was a stacked year—Downey Jr. was up against Clint Eastwood for Unforgiven, Denzel Washington for Malcolm X, and eventual winner Al Pacino for Scent of a Woman—and maybe could’ve won if the movie had slightly different timing.

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Downey appeared as part of the ensemble in one of legendary director Robert Altman’s late-career masterpieces, Short Cuts. Based on the writings of Raymond Carver, this movie features a number of intercut storylines that kind of feel like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, but released six years before Magnolia (PTA himself is an Altman devotee). Short Cuts isn’t available to stream, but you should grab the excellent Criterion DVD or Blu-Ray to check it out at home.

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Oliver Stone’s 1994 darkly satirical thriller Natural Born Killers (based on a script originally written by Quentin Tarantino) served as the vehicle for perhaps Downey’s most memorable role of the ’90s. The movie follows a couple (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis) who, after horrific childhoods, meet and become a famed serial killer couple; Downey Jr. plays a sociopathic tabloid journalist on their trail, documenting it all.

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Based on Michael Chabon’s book of the same name, Wonder Boys follows an author (Michael Douglas) who’s first book was deemed a “great American novel”—and has struggled to follow it up with anything. Downey Jr. plays his editor in a memorable supporting role.

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For as ambitious as The Singing Detective is—a musical mystery comedy based on a BBC series of the same name—it isn’t particularly good. But if it wasn’t for this film, where Downey plays the lead and, due to being at a particularly unreliable point in his life, needed his insurance bond for the film (ensuring he would complete his work, or else the production be otherwise financially reimbursed) to be paid, believe it or not, by costar Mel Gibson, then the entire last two decades of RDJ may not have ever happened.

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Writer/director Shane Black cast RDJ in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a super fun comedy/action flick (like most of Black’s films) where he stars alongside Val Kilmer. Often cited as the role that helped Downey land Iron Man, the star would eventually repay the favor; he got Black the job directing Iron Man 3 a few years down the line.

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The most unique project on this list may just be A Scanner Darkly, directed by Richard Linklater and based on a Philip K. Dick novel of the same name; the movie was shot in live-action, and then put through a rotoscope animation process, giving it an extremely unique look. Downey was drawn to the project thanks to the presence of Linklater as director and Keanu Reeves in the lead role; he plays a drug-addicted roommate of Reeves’s character.

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Downey Jr. was fully in his bag by the time he was starring in Zodiac, David Fincher’s true crime epic about the hunt for the serial killer who haunted California’s Bay Area during the ’60s and ’70s. Downey plays Paul Avery, a crime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle on the case, who is at first dismissive of Jake Gyllenhaal’s obsessive cartoonist Robert Graysmith. Downey’s charm and charisma are fully on display, but he also gets to flex the acting muscles as the movie goes on and Avery begins a descent.

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We’re only going to include one MCU movie on this list, and it’s going to be the first—and most important—one. And that’s not up for debate. While there are tons of other highlights during RDJ’s MCU run (including nailing the finale in Avengers: Endgame), the simple fact is that if Iron Man didn’t work, the movie business today, for better and for worse, would be very different. But he nailed it, and set history on a whole different course.

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Between Iron Man and Tropic Thunder, Downey’s 2008 was pretty magical (he also had The Soloist, which was kind of a failed Oscar bait movie). But Tropic Thunder—which features RDJ in a clever-but-controversial role as a pretentious Australian method actor who’s so up his own butt that he tries to method act as a Black character—is a rare comedy/war/satire flick that really hits its marks and mostly holds up to this day.

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The MCU wasn’t Downey’s only franchise—in 2009 he starred in the a Sherlock Holmes film, playing the world’s greatest detective himself (alongside Jude Law as John Watson) in a well-done film from director Guy Ritchie. The movie spawned a 2011 sequel, and remains a fun movie to pop on when you’re bored or catch a bit of here and there when flipping through channels.

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After his MCU run came to an end in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, Downey got to work (as a producer and on-screen interviewee) on Sr.—a documentary film where he paid tribute to his father, Robert Downey Sr., who was a prolific filmmaker in his own right, and who died in 2021 before completion of the film. It’s an intimate look into a vital relationship that played a huge role in shaping the actor into the man he is today.

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That brings us to Oppenheimer, the Christopher Nolan-helmed masterpiece that won Best Picture, Best Director for Nolan, Best Actor for Cillian Murphy, and Best Supporting Actor for Downey Jr. In case anyone actually thought that all those years in Marvel land impacted RDJ’s ability as an actor, this is definitive proof that he still very much has it. His portrayal of Lewis Strauss comes with layers; he’s the film’s heel, in a way, but in the quieter moments you can’t look away, and when he explodes, he demands your attention. Downey Jr. is fantastic in Oppenheimer, and while he’s returning to Marvel with Avengers: Doomsday, we can’t wait to see what other kinds of movies he does next.

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While The Sympathizer is a limited HBO series and not a proper film, we’re going to count it. Park Chan-wook, one of the greatest directors alive, was behind the camera for the first three episodes and served as a co-showrunner for this incredibly cutting story of espionage in the time just after the Vietnam war. Downey earned an Emmy nomination for playing a number of Americans, all of whom have one thing in common: trying to chew up and spit out the Vietnamese people they conceivably are trying to help. The Sympathizer didn’t get as much attention as some other HBO shows, or some other movies on this list, but it’s very much worth your time.

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