Avengers: Endgame Special Feature Reveals Robert Downey Jr’s Original Iron Man Screen Test

Marvel Studios has released a clip from a new special feature included with the Avengers: Endgame home media release. The special feature goes back a decade to the original Iron Man. In the featurette, director Jon Favreau, casting director Sarah Halley Flynn, producer Louis D’Esposito, and star Robert Downey Jr. discuss the casting process that led to Downey becoming Marvel Studios’ first superhero.

Flynn recalls that Favreau loved the idea of Downey as Tony Stark. Knowing they’d have to sell it to the studio, Flynn suggested creating a screentest. From the word go it was clear no one else could be Iron Man.

The featurette includes a clip from that screentest. You can take a look above (via Fandango).

While Downey seemed born to play the role of Tony Stark, he explained in a recent interview how he tried to create distance between himself and the character. “Initially, by creating and associating and synergizing with Tony Stark and the Marvel Universe … and being a good company man, but also being a little off-kilter, being creative and getting into all these other partnerships, it was a time when … what do they say? Owners start looking like their pets,” Downey said.

“I am not my work,” he continued. “I am not what I did with that studio. I am not that period of time that I spent playing this character. And it sucks because the kid in all of us wants to be like, ‘No. It’s always going to be summer camp and we’re all holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’.”

With Iron Making his grand sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame, it’s time for Downey to move on to new challenges. “I have not been forced to explore the new frontier of what is my creative and personal life after this,” Downey said. “It’s always good to get ahead of where you are about to be. If you put eyes on ‘that’s going to be a big turn down there, spring of ’19,’ I better start psychically getting on top of that. … It’s always in the transitions between one phase and the next phase that people fall apart.”

What do you think of Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man screentest? Let us know what you think about it in the comments section. Avengers: Endgame is now playing in theaters. The film is growing closer to overtaking Avatar as the highest-grossing film of all time at the box office.