Clark Gregg Says He Knew Iron Man Would Be A Huge Success If Robert Downey Jr. Showed Up

Iron Man reshaped the career of Robert Downey Jr., once again turning him into a bonafide superstar. Even with all the troubles the actor had pre-Iron Man, Clark Gregg saw Downey’s success coming a mile away. In a recent podcast stop, Gregg said that he had full faith Downey could overcome his “addiction issues” and get back on track in Tinsel Town.

“From the minute I saw that Jon Favreau was directing this movie of Iron Man with Robert Downey as that character with Gwenyth [Paltrow] and Jeff Bridges, I knew that if Robert was able to show up and, you know, become the talent that we’ve all hoped he would be able to be — you know, with the addiction issues — that it would be one of the greatest versions, the best possible version that could have ever been. And he really, really nailed it,” the Iron Man and Agents of SHIELD star said on the latest episode of At Home With The Creative Coalition.

The actor first ran into drug-related charges in the mid-1990s, and had a string of arrests before getting sober at some point in 2003. He’s often attributed his sobriety to his wife Susan, a film producer he met on the set of Gothika.

After appearing in Iron Man and The Avengers, Gregg went on to play Agent Phil Coulson (and a few derivatives) over seven years of television on Agents of SHIELD. He returned to the Marvel Studios world in Captain Marvel, and has no future Marvel projects on the horizon. At least projects that have been confirmed by the studio, that is.

“There were some projects that I’d been working on during all my downtime, during Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and there’s just so much interesting stuff happening in the longer format stuff — you know, on Netflix […] So I have a couple of ideas that I’ve been developing and been working on those as much as I can get my brain to work here,” the actor added. “There’s television ideas and a feature idea. I was talking to some people about a film that I might do. So still continuing to act, but my dream is to try to make something, a long-form story that I can shoot and use my friends to be in.”

Iron Man — and all of Downey’s other MCU movies — can be seen on Disney+.

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