A killer robot brings Robert Downey Jr. and James Spader together again
One guy is the face of the Marvel movie franchise, the other is its latest big, bad villain, and there's a whole lot of metal involved in between. But Avengers: Age of Ultron (in theaters Friday, in case you've been buried in a Hydra fortress) rekindles an old friendship between Robert Downey Jr. (as Iron Man) and old friend James Spader (as Ultron) dating back to the 1980s, when the two buddies shared screen time in 1985's Tuff Turf and two years later in Less Than Zero.
They didn't have the best on-screen relationship in Less Than Zero — with Spader's Rip playing drug dealer and quasi-pimp to Downey's Julian.
And they definitely don't in Age of Ultron — with Spader's 8-foot-tall vibranium destruction machine Ultron playing Frankenstein's monster to Downey's genius inventor Tony Stark.
Last year on the British set of Avengers, Downey told us about how awesome it was to work alongside Spader again:
"We’ve all experienced James Spader and it is something to behold. I couldn’t imagine the second Avengers having the cool factor to any greater degree with anyone else than him. You wouldn’t have necessarily gone, 'Age of Ultron? James Spader!' six months ago. We just have to make sure the bad guy doesn’t steal the movie, but that’s an editorial issue."
More recently, Spader described to us how Downey's changed over the years — "He devotes an enormous amount of energy and time to living very healthy and constructive life" — but more importantly how well they've meshed as on-screen super-antagonists:
"It speaks to how close we were when we were younger, and it seems like the lightning speed of the passage of time where we really didn’t see each other much at all. ... The time I have spent with Robert since we found each other again on the set of this film has really not been about work or about Avengers or careers or the rest of it. It’s really been about him and me — it was just friends again. We picked up exactly where we left off."
In other words ... BROS BEFORE ROBOS.
Downey jokingly admits though that while it seems he has a lot of say in filmmaking choices — Spader in Ultron, his Kiss Kiss Bang Bang director Shane Black doing Iron Man 3 — he's not quite that important:
"I’m a great rep for Marvel but I’m not a board member or anything. I appreciate it when a big entity and a media entertainment conglomerate like Marvel tends to make decisions that seem like they were my idea. That way I’m less likely to complain about them, particularly if they’re really cool ideas that seem like they may have been my idea."
And yes, Spader thinks it was a really cool idea. Obviously.