Robert Downey Jr. has secured a $100 million deal to appear in two upcoming Marvel films, making him the highest-paid actor of all time. But the people closest to the 61-year-old say the real story behind his rise is his wife Susan.
“Robert would not be alive without Susan. Period,” said a woman who lives near the couple’s eco-home in Malibu. “There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that, if Susan hadn’t picked him, he’d be in the gutter or worse by now.”
The Deal
Downey appeared at San Diego’s Comic-Con last weekend to announce his role in Avengers: Doomsday, due in December, for which he will earn $50 million. A sequel, Avengers: Secret Wars, due next year, accounts for the second half of the payout. In both films he will play Doctor Doom.
His payday surpasses the $46 million Tom Cruise earned for last year’s Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. A source at Walt Disney Studios, which owns Marvel, said Downey has made ten Marvel films as Iron Man that together earned more than $12 billion at the box office. “There’s no one else on the planet who can do that,” the source said.
The Fall
The deal represents one of Hollywood’s most dramatic turnarounds. In the late 1990s, Downey was earning eight cents an hour scrubbing pans inside Los Angeles County Jail, having been jailed multiple times for drug offenses.
Among the more notorious episodes from that period: Downey stumbled into a stranger’s home in Malibu while high on cocaine and fell asleep in an 11-year-old boy’s bed. On another occasion he was arrested for driving his Porsche naked down Sunset Boulevard. In 1999, he was sentenced to three years in state prison for repeatedly violating probation on drugs and weapons charges, ultimately serving one year.
During one court appearance he told a judge the drugs were like “having a shotgun in my mouth with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal.”
Friends Sean Penn and Dennis Quaid paid for him to attend a rehab facility in Arizona. He was cast in the hit television series Ally McBeal but was fired because of his addiction issues and lost his Malibu home. In 2001 he pleaded no contest to cocaine possession and received three years’ probation.
The Rescue
Downey met Susan Levin in the summer of 2003 on the set of the film Gothika, where she was working as a producer. She reportedly gave him an ultimatum: the drugs or her. He dumped his stash into the Pacific Ocean outside a Burger King and proposed to her on the eve of her 30th birthday. They married in 2005 after a two-year engagement she insisted upon.
Susan, now 52, grew up in Chicago as the daughter of a wealthy businessman. In a 2014 interview with the Hollywood Reporter she said addiction had been foreign to her. “I was incredibly ignorant of the hold it had on people,” she said.
It was Susan who urged Downey to take the Iron Man role at a time, a friend said, when Marvel was not considered a prestige property and Downey was reluctant to play a comic-book character. The couple went on to form a joint production company, Team Downey.
Neighbors and friends say the couple is inseparable. “She rules him with a rod of iron, in the nicest possible way,” said the Malibu neighbor. At a party, the same source asked Downey whether he would ever be tempted by drink or drugs again. He waved his arm and said, “Why would I risk this?”
The Oscar
When Downey won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2024 for his role as Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer, he addressed Susan directly from the stage. “She found me, a snarling rescue pet, and you loved me back to life,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.”
The couple have two children together, son Exton, 14, and daughter Avri, 11. Friends describe them as devoted parents who attend every school event. Susan rarely gives interviews and, about her role in her husband’s recovery, remains modest, saying her contribution was “small” but that the key was “creating an alternative world for them that says, ‘Hey, I’m here if you’re clean.'”
Those who have watched the Downeys for two decades see it differently. “I don’t think anyone but Susan could have cleaned him up and kept him clean,” one longtime friend said.
