Who is the billionaire Robert Downey Jr. was inspired by the role of Tony Stark in Iron Man?

Iron Man is that cornerstone that managed to build the enormous structure that the Marvel Cinematic Universe (UCM) enjoys today. With the premiere of Iron Man in the year 2008, the fans did not take a second to click with the interpretation that Robert Downey Jr. gave to Tony Stark.

With this successful feature film, directed by Jon Favreau, the then-unknown company Marvel Studios wanted to launch a project that would definitively connect with fans. And in this way, it form a wide universe of films in which the rest of the characters of the franchise popularized by the Stan Lee comics were getting involved.

According to Qué Ver, the director of the film, who also acts as Happy Hogan, met with RD to start brainstorming how he could play a leading role that would click with people.

The same portal relates that the first agreement between Favreau and Downey Jr was to make a credible character for the people; someone who could actually exist in the world, even though he was a science fiction superhero.

So, Robert Downey Jr.’s idea was to find the most outgoing person among the billionaires in the world.

Such a search did not take long, because the actor met a person who, in addition to amassing a huge fortune, is also fully involved in science, being one of the brilliant minds of that time (and this one too).

RD’s inspiration for Tony Stark in Iron Man

The person who ticks almost all the boxes is the creator of SpaceX, CEO of Tesla Motors, and director of Starlink: Elon Musk.

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, and nationalized Canadian and American, Elon Musk is a physicist, economist, and programmer. His personality is very similar to Tony Stark’s, or at least that’s what he communicates through his behavior in interviews or on social media.

It was then that upon learning of Musk’s resume, the production of the film organized a meeting between the billionaire businessman and Robert Downey Jr. The meeting was in Elon’s environment with the intention that the interpreter of Tony Stark could absorb as much information as possible.

According to what Jon Favreau himself says, Downey Jr. even adopted gestures from Elon Musk to develop them in the first Iron Man movie, the other two that followed him, and the rest of the feature films in which the owner of Stark participated. Industries.

However, not everything ended there. The scope was so wide that Elon Musk himself, as everyone must know, had a cameo in Iron Man 2, just before Tony got into a racing car at the Monte Carlo circuit in Monaco and unleashed a brutal battle with Ivan Vanco.