Robert Downey Jr. is finally an Oscar winner.
The 58-year-old “Oppenheimer” star took home the Best Supporting Actor Oscar at the 96th Academy Awards live from the Dolby Theater in LA on Sunday.
Downey portrayed Lewis Strauss within the Christopher Nolan-directed film: a businessman who played an enormous role within the development of the atomic bomb and later became a political rival of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy).
“Oppenheimer” led the 2024 Oscar nominations with 13 nods, followed by “Poor Things” with 11. The film’s box office rival, “Barbie,” was up for eight golden statues.
Downey is a two-time Oscar nominee, losing his first Best Actor nod for “Chaplin” to Al Pacino for “Scent of a Woman” in 1993.
In a January appearance on “The View,” Downey, who famously served jail time for drugs over the course of several years after his initial nomination, said that he was glad he lost the award because it will’ve given him a false sense of success.
“I used to be young and crazy,” he said, adding that an Oscar win at 28 years old “would have put me under the impression that I used to be on the fitting track.”
He received a second Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actor for “Tropic Thunder” in 2009, making “Oppenheimer” his third nod.
The 2024 award season has are available in abundance for the Marvel actor.
First, he scored a Golden Globe for “Oppenheimer,” praising his wife and “primary caregiver” Susan, 50, in his acceptance speech.
“[She] literally made an art out of extracting me from my comfort zone,” he said at the time. “But she’s easy on the eyes, so whatevs.”
He also won for at the SAG Awards, joking onstage, “Unlike my fellow nominees, I’ll never grow drained from the sound of my very own voice.”
He again used the platform to shoutout Susan.
“For 22 years, she has flawlessly portrayed a sane and rational individual who’s happily married to an actor,” Downey quipped.
“Oppenheimer” also stars Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon and Josh Hartnett.
Blunt, who previously worked with director Nolan on “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Interstellar,” revealed in Variety’s “Actors on Actors“ that she warned Downey about Nolan’s British approach to giving positive reinforcement and affirmations.
“I remember after I first met Robert Downey Jr. I said, ‘You’re going to only like it a lot and the screws are going to get tightened on you a lot and it’s just probably the most focused, wonderful, unchaotic set. But you’re going to get some very British compliments,’” Blunt recalled.
“‘There can be no smoke blown up your ass and also you’re going to must be alright with it.’”
Meanwhile, Murphy gushed to GQ in July about Downey’s astounding professionalism.
“A variety of the scenes I actually have with Downey, it was quite loose and quite improvisational,” the “Peaky Blinders” alum said. “I mean, acting with him was just extraordinary. He’s just electrifying, probably the most available, engaged, present, unpredictably good actor I’ve ever worked with.”
In January, Downey told W Magazine that the film “was really a leap of religion with Chris.”
“All the things about playing Lewis Strauss was…I don’t need to say difficult, however it was counterintuitive for me. I do know that we’re all mixtures of what our persona is and who we actually are,” Downey explained.
“Nolan was inviting me to show the mirror onto an unexplored portion of myself. And the character, to me, is everybody who has ever felt slighted by any individual who was more necessary than them. It gave me a number of time to reflect. I wondered if I’ve come off like that to people prior to now. And I wondered if I were them, if I wouldn’t seek to destroy me.”