Tony Stark breaks all the rules (even the one
that says superheroes must keep a secret identity), and he always seems
to come out on top — that’s why we love him. But now comes “Iron Man 2,”
a film about secret dangers, the sins of the father and the nasty price
of modern celebrity. We have behind-the-scenes scoops on the summer’s
most anticipated film.
This is a longer version of my upcoming Sunday Calendar cover story.
At the recent “
Iron Man 2” premiere at Hollywood’s
El Capitan Theatre,
the film’s stars seemed to be channeling their characters for the
over-the-top event, which featured cheerleaders in provocative red and
gold outfits, fireworks and throngs of fans.
Robert Downey Jr., who plays billionaire hero
Tony Stark, was all ironic charm and sparkling hubris, for instance, while
Mickey Rourke, who portrays the sullen villain
Ivan Vanko, slowly made his way up the red carpet in sunglasses and a leather-lapel suit that gave him an air of reptilian menace.
And then there was
Don Cheadle, who seemed a bit
skeptical of the entire affair but dutifully followed the smile-and-wave
assignment given to the stars of summer blockbusters. That good-soldier
attitude fits his character, Air Force
Lt. Col. James “Rhodey” Rhodes, who spends much of the film torn between his heart and his marching orders.
The 45-year-old actor had plenty of conflicted feelings to draw on
for the role; the “Iron Man 2” was the Oscar-nominated actor’s first
experience in a big-budget special effects movie, and there was a lot of
anxiety amid the explosions. Cheadle had not seen the film before the
premiere and, after the credits rolled, he admitted that he had feared
the heavy machinery might have spun out of control.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “This is the first time I saw it. I’m very happy.”
He didn’t look especially thrilled when giving his review, actually,
but then again, that’s probably par for the course, as Cheadle has
described himself as someone who is rarely satisfied with the finished
product.
“It was,” he said with a thin grin, “a lot of fun.”
There were a lot of new faces in this return to
“Iron Man” — Rourke,
Scarlett Johansson,
Sam Rockwell and
Garry Shandling among them — but Cheadle is set apart from them because he was brought in to take on a role that was played with flair by
Terrence Howard
in the first film, one of the biggest hits of 2008. Howard was ejected
from the franchise in a spat over personality and a proposed pay cut; he
was reportedly the first cast member signed for the franchise and,
somewhat surprisingly, the movie’s highest-paid actor.
Marvel Studios,
Paramount and director
Jon Favreau
all fretted about changing the actor in such a key role. Rhodey is
Stark’s best friend and in this new film becomes an armored hero himself
— he goes by the indelicate name of
War Machine — which was foreshadowed in the first installment.
For Cheadle, there was also the awkwardness of replacing a friend. Cheadle and Howard were costars in
“Crash,” the 2004 film that won the Oscar for best picture, and Cheadle was a producer on “
Crash” who championed the casting of Howard in that film.
“I didn’t actually know the [Howard] situation, and I just wanted to
kind of stay out of it,” Cheadle said a few days before the premiere as
he sat watching the NBA playoffs at his Santa Monica offices. “I just
wanted to make sure that I was not taking a role away from him. Once
they had moved off of him and it was clear he wasn’t coming back, they
offered it to me. I think they gave me five hours to decide. I was at my
kid’s birthday party. They were on a tight schedule and needed an
answer.”
Cheadle didn’t have to think too long. He loved Marvel Comics as a
kid and gravitated toward that publisher’s singular brand of cosmic
melodramas with flawed, conflicted heroes. Also, after putting together
an eclectic resume — he was Oscar-nominated for
“Hotel Rwanda” and made memorable turns in all-star ensemble films such as “
Crash,” “
Boogie Nights” and “
Ocean’s Eleven” — he was ready for a tour of duty as an action figure.
Still, playing a human gear-box isn’t all fun and games.
“I have a question about the suits — why was Robert’s armor all hard
plastic and fiberglass and mine was metal? You never wear the whole
thing — there’s always some element of it that is being drawn on later,
but you carry enough of it to feel it. Walking around with a barbecue
grill on my back would have been great compared to this. You have no
mobility. I imagine it’s what it was like to be a knight. You can’t
touch your face. You can’t get a drink of water on your own. If you get
an itch, you have to call for help.”
War Machine is gun-metal and gun-loaded — essentially his armor is a
less-sleek version of Iron Man’s suit that has been augmented with “a
ridiculous amount of firepower,” as Favreau puts it — and has been part
of the Marvel universe for years.
When Cheadle took on the role, the studio shipped over a mountain of
reference material tracking the Rhodey character to his first appearance
in 1979, but Cheadle’s eyes glazed over after a while. Every few
seasons, the writer of the comics would change and so would Rhodey.
“Marvel sent me
every iteration of Rhodey that has existed, which is a
million different people,”
Cheadle said with a chuckle. “There’s no real mean there other than the
fact that he is Tony Stark’s friend. That is the paramount relationship
in the lives of these two guys. And that friendship is what keeps
getting pushed and pulled in the second movie, particularly. How does a
friend take care of a friend who’s not taking care of himself?”
In the film, the U.S. military wants to confiscate the armor of Iron
Man for national defense, which puts Rhodey in a tense position as he
tries to protect his friend. When Stark starts going off the rails in
his personal life, though, Rhodey feels betrayed, and he steals the War
Machine suit while Stark is getting drunk at his own birthday party.
Favreau said it’s an essential part of the film’s physics.
“One of the main tensions in this film is someone being an individual
or part of a team — the lone gunslinger or the person who is ready to
help his partners,” the director said. “Rhodey, he’s a character that
came up through the Air Force, which is all about teamwork and
support. No man can go it alone. Pilots are individuals, but they rely
greatly on the technology and their trainers and the ground crew and
their wingman. That’s Rhodey’s background. Then you have Tony Stark,
who’s gotten everything he’s ever gotten by breaking rules, by being a
loose cannon. We explore that theme.”
Cheadle said the character wasn’t the big challenge, it was the
massive size of the movie and the tricky magic of making a contemporary
special-effects film.
“So much happens after you’re done and gone — with all the special
effects, you walk away and 75 other people get hold of it and take it to
a place you never expected,” Cheadle said. “There were days when you’d
be finished and you don’t know what you have. You never know what’s
going to happen. And because they can do everything sometimes you find
yourself sometimes find yourself in a position of trying to do
anything.”
There was also the added wrinkle of the working style of director
Favreau and star Downey — the first film was a success by bottling the
improvisational magic of Downey as the wounded-party boy and, with the
exception of the carefully planned special-effects set-pieces, the rest
of the film was up for grabs. (
Jeff Bridges, a star of
the first film, said the constant reworking made him like he was
laboring on “the world’s most expensive student film.” Cheadle, the
perfectionist, found the approach to be appropriate but also daunting.
He said it was the exact right way to make a movie, though, that banks on it’s title star.
“You look at the first movie and the reason it was successful was
Robert. It was predicated on the fact that there was a dark centerpiece
to it. You have Tony Stark wake up and he’s in a cave and he’s got wires
sticking out of his chest. For the audience, you’re like ‘
What the hell?
What kind of movie am I watching?’ It kept one foot in something that
felt like a purely tent pole, fantasy sort of movie and the other in
something that was really gritty and real. That juxtaposition of tones
is what made that movie interesting. And Robert was the key to all of
that. The humor and the darkness. It took it beyond the usual popcorn
thing.”
Cheadle brings a very different energy to the character than the
dashing yet frosty Howard; there’s plenty of high-tech warfare in this
film, but the most interesting conflicts seem to happen behind the eyes
of Cheadle’s less-aloof version of Rhodey.
Favreau admits that he was anxious about the departure of Howard from
the cast, even though other films in the same sector weathered similar
cast changes (
Michael Gambon took on the Dumbledore role in the “
Harry Potter” franchise after the death of Richard Harris, and in “
The Dark Knight,”
Maggie Gyllenhaal replaced
Katie Holmes as Gotham prosecutor
Rachel Dawes). In short order, though, Favreau found that his superhero machine was humming along nicely with the new part in place.
“Don and Robert have tremendous chemistry together,” Favreau said.
On screen, the role handoff is handled with a wink. Early in the
film, Stark is in front of a hostile congressional committee when a new
witness is called — his best friend Rhodey. When it’s Cheadle who walks
in, not Howard, Downey says, “Hey buddy, didn’t expect to see you here.”
The military man doesn’t miss a beat: “Look, it’s me, I’m here. Deal
with it. Let’s move on.”
A few weeks after Cheadle got the role he (almost literally) ran into Howard in the
NBC-Universal
parking lot. “We had a talk and put it all to bed. I was glad it
happened. I think people can kind of get cloudy in this business
sometimes and think it’s all about the job and success. It can be
seductive to try to get every role. But if you don’t have personal
relationships, if you don’t have blood beating in your body, what’s it
all about?”
Multifaceted actor
Donald Frank Cheadle Jr. was
born in Kansas City, Mo., three days after Thanksgiving in 1964, the son
of a clinical psychologist father and a psychology teacher mother. He’s
a thinking-man’s actor, but he grows restless with the notion of
limiting his pursuits to just reading scripted lines.
In addition to “Crash,” he has producer credits on the 2008 thriller
“Traitor” as well as the 2007 documentary “
Darfur Now,”
which spoke to his impassioned work to bring attention to the genocide
in Sudan. He’s also a renaissance man; he plays the saxophone, sings,
composes music, and he once beat poker champ
Phil Ivey in a national heads-up event.
Cheadle has two daughters,
Ayana Tai and
Imani, with longtime girlfriend
Bridgid Coulter (she played his wife in “
Rosewood”
in 1997, the same year they had their first child), and he brought the
whole family to the “Iron Man 2” premiere. “My girls, though, they have
no interest in this Iron Man stuff,” Cheadle said with a shrug. “I mean,
c’mon, War Machine, that is a total boy thing. I mean, look at the guy.
He’s covered in guns. Kill, kill, shoot, shoot, fly, kill, shoot … that
is
so a boy thing.”
Turning himself into a human action figure was a strange but
ultimately satisfying experience, he said, even if it was a little
outside his comfort zone. Cheadle, who was most recently seen in the
brutal “
Brooklyn’s Finest” as a deep-cover narcotics detective, will return to the hustlers and handcuffs sector with the 2011 release of “
The Guard,” which has him playing an FBI agent in a cast that also includes
Brendan Gleeson and
Mark Strong.
It’s familiar underworld turf for Cheadle, who made his breakthrough with the metal-toothed malice of a killer named
Mouse Alexander in
Carl Franklin’s 1995 “
Devil in a Blue Dress.”
The actor says he seeks out great scripts and great directors, but he
does try to keep some variety in the career mosaic he’s shaping.
“Are we driven more by our near-misses?” he asked when talking about
picking his parts. “It’s an interesting way to think about things. I
enjoy doing comedic roles. I think those are roles I have done and
people see it and it works for them, but they seem sort of surprised by
it still. I did stand-up for a minute, and comedy is some of my favorite
stuff to do. And it’s some of the hardest stuff to do.”
New challenges have never swayed Cheadle. He received largely positive reviews for his funny work in “
Talk to Me” even if the biopic of radio DJ deejay
Petey Greene was shrugged off as too pat and sentimental, and he was unforgettable as
Buck Swope, the cowpoke porn star in “
Boogie Nights.” And then there was his turn as the British explosives expert
Basher Tarr, the exasperated anarchist among the slick con men of “
Ocean’s Eleven”; he returned for the two sequels and has, it turns out, now made five films with buddy
George Clooney (“
Out of Sight” and “
Fail Safe” stand as the non-“Ocean’s” collaborations).
Cheadle says he walks onto a movie set with the goal of not stealing
scenes — he looks more for a submarine approach, staying contained and
under the surface. “I want the movie to be good. You don’t do that by
stealing scenes. You do that by giving them away,” he said, suggesting
that Favreau’s themes of teamwork apply to film sets as well.
For “Iron Man 2,” with Cheadle wearing another actor’s role and
uniform, competing for scenes with Downey would have been a dereliction
of duty. “We had a lot of fun going back and forth, but it was really
challenging most days not to fall into his patois. It’s seductive. You
find yourself wanting to play back and forth and both of us have the
similar kind of wit. But my character, Rhodey, he is not that guy. He
couldn’t play with Tony like that, he wouldn’t be able to or interested.
That’s not his mission so it wasn’t mine.”
Now that “Iron Man 2” is off to a flying start (it has made $100
million overseas already), is Cheadle setting his sights on a long
career as War Machine in future Marvel films?
“I have no idea,” he said. “I’m not just trying to be coy. Look, I
didn’t know what we were doing on any given day on the set. You think I
know what’s happening with the next movie? I imagine there will be a
next movie if this one does good, but I don’t know what it will be or
what it will look like.”
He offered a slight smile before adding: “Maybe Terrence will be back and I’ll be out….”
— Geoff Boucher
