Robert Downey Jr's Upbringing Explains A Lot

I have this picture in my head of your upbringing being kind of like this crazy art commune where anything goes and it's like a salon in the 20s or something. I mean, what was it like? I mean, your dad has a reputation for being, you know, a very eclectic artist, a very, you know, odd director who would pull people out of phone booths and give them a part in his movie. And what was the Downey household like? Even before you thought, oh, I'm going to be a professional actor, you were in the arts every day, kind of. Yeah. And by the way, I don't know if I ever really had that thought that this is what I'm going to do. It never occurred to me to do anything else. And it just kind of, you know, life happens. Nowadays, I think about it in the context of how absolutely competitive it is to go out and land a job anywhere from having a background of, you know, extraordinary training or just being somebody who was on a reality show for two days. But the way I grew up was, you know, my mom and dad were actually kind of squares who found themselves being really entrenched in this kind of counterculture, underground filmmaking world. And so it was all the people you would expect who'd been around and, you know, in Greenwich Village around that time. And so to me, it was just really natural. Like, for instance, the other day, me and the missus and a bunch of people were sitting around spitballing on kind of a big studio movie. And Exton, our 14-month-old, toddles in the room, and he just sits there. And while we're all talking and ideas are going back and forth, and we're laughing or we're, you know, or we're whatever, talking smack about some potential casting choice or doing whatever you do, we're just kibitzing. And the ideas were all kind of, you know, heating this project up to 211 degrees and stirring it slowly and seeing what happens, you know, we're developing it. And I look over and so in a sentence, that was my childhood was what I saw Exton having. It was absolutely natural. And I took my comfort in being around the situation where, whether it was after hours and my dad was playing a poker game with, you know, pick a name of someone who was in that kind of world in the late 60s, to him and my mom trying to beat each other with what a funny one-liner was for, you know, this transitionary scene in a movie.