Robert Downey Jr. has riled up the Internet — because someone has to — by making what some believe was a racist remark about Mexican Oscar-winning director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.
In a recent interview with The Guardian about his new film “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” Downey — who plays Iron Man in the movie — was asked his opinion about Inarritu’s recent remarks calling superhero films “cultural genocide.”
“Look I respect the heck out of him. I think for a man whose native tongue is Spanish to be able to put together a phrase like ‘cultural genocide’ just speaks to how bright he is,” Downey said.
How weird — Robert Downey Jr. getting passive aggressive.
Of course, people on social media reacted, calling Downey racist and ignorant and whatnot.
The new controversy comes just days after 50-year-old Downey walked out of an interview with British reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy, who insisted on asking questions about Downey’s history with substance abuse.
Inarritu was also target of what some called a racist remark at the Oscars, from his friend Sean Penn. While Penn announced “Birdman” won the Oscar for best picture, he quipped “Who gave this son of a bitch his green card?” Inarritu laughed about it afterward
According to the Daily Mail, Inarritu ripped action films in a 2014 interview with Deadline.
“I sometimes enjoy them because they are basic and simple and go well with popcorn,” he said. “The problem is that sometimes they purport to be profound, based on some Greek mythological kind of thing. And they are honestly very right wing.
‘I always see them as killing people because they do not believe in what you believe, or they are not being who you want them to be.”
OK … so what would he propose we do when, like, aliens start tearing holes in the sky and dropping angry robots with lasers all over New York City? Huh? What then, smart guy?
He continued “I hate that, and don’t respond to those characters. They have been poison, this cultural genocide, because the audience is so overexposed to plot and explosions and (expletive) that doesn’t mean nothing about the experience of being human. Superheroes … just the word ‘hero’ bothers me. What the (expletive) does that mean? It’s a false, misleading conception, the superhero. Then, the way they apply violence to it, it’s absolutely right wing. If you observe the mentality of most of those films, it’s really about people who are rich, who have power, who will do the good, who will kill the bad. Philosophically, I just don’t like them.”
I guess someone has taken himself out of the running to direct the next Avengers movie.
Tony Hicks writes celebrity commentary for the Bay Area News Group. Contact him at Facebook.com/BayAreaNewsGroup.TonyHicks or Twitter.com/tonyhicks67
