Robert Downey Jr’s late father revealed that he was the one to first introduce his son to drugs at the tender age of six in a newly-unearthed interview.
The 57-year-old Iron Man actor has long been open about his struggles with drug addiction – and previously explained that his father offered him his first hit.
At the time, his father saw him taking a sip from a glass of white wine whilst he was playing poker in their family home — and instead of taking the glass away from him, he handed him a joint and told him to smoke it.
After his son grew up, the director, who died in July 2021, revealed that he made “a terrible, stupid mistake” by allowing his son to take drugs at such a young age.
In a 2000 interview with Vanity Fair, Downey Sr recalled: “We were all sitting around, smoking grass and playing poker down in the old West Village loft, and Robert was staring at me kind of funny. Robert was always an observer of it all, even at a very young age.
“And I go, ‘You know, you ought to try a little of this instead of drinking’.
“I passed him a joint. And suddenly I knew I had made a terrible, stupid mistake… Giving a little kid a toke of grass just to be funny.”
The unearthed interview comes as a new documentary about Robert Downey Jr’s father, Robert Downey Sr, landed on Netflix last month.
Sr explores the life of anti-establishment filmmaker Downey Sr, who died from Parkinson’s in 2021.
It focuses on the relationship between the maverick filmmaker, who in the documentary is making his own documentary about his life, and his Marvel Universe-starring son.
Their relationship is front and centre of the film, making it a particularly poignant and fascinating picture.
Downey Sr was both a filmmaker and actor but was best known for his satirical Sixties indie films.
His most notable work was his 1969 film Putney Swope — which probed corporate corruption, race in Hollywood and advertising — and has been deemed so culturally important that the US Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in its National Film Registry in 2016.
