Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo Call Marvel Scripts ‘BS,’ ‘Gobbledygook’

Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo—better known as Iron Man and the Hulk—offered a harsh evaluation of parts of Marvel’s screenplays in an interview for Variety’s Actors on Actors series. The actors, who co-starred in Zodiac (2007), are in awards contention for their respective performances in Oppenheimer and Poor Things. Christopher Nolan’s biopic and Yórgos Lánthimos’ erotic horror-comedy are as far from Marvel as one can get, and the actors were surprisingly frank as they spent a good portion of the interview expressing relief at being done with the superhero grind.

As discussion turned to the scripts of Oppenheimer and Poor Things, the star’s agreed that being able to play a range of emotions, rather than spout reams of exposition, was a great luxury. Even better was having a screenplay which didn’t change during filming.

“I mean, in the Marvel days,” Downey recalled, “everything might change or we’re talking to a tennis ball. You and I, the science bros, we would have these long passages about absolute gobbledygook…”

“Bullshit,” Ruffalo interjected. “We didn’t know what that was, what that meant.”

“It’d be really hard to dig in,” Downey admitted of the writing. “I mean, we would just drive each other insane on set going, ‘Why can’t I retain this?’ But again, we know when it’s time to tighten things up a little bit,” the actor said of moving on to other roles. In July, Downey admitted he was “happy” to be done acting in Marvel films. “You start to wonder if a muscle you have hasn’t atrophied,” he told The New York Times Magazine.

Though Iron Man’s rumored return to the MCU was definitively laid to rest, Downey did express an openness to returning to sci-fi. He specified that if he did, though, it would likely be in a project that allows him more freedom to flex his acting muscles.

“I will continue to love [the genre] and I’m happy to eventually reengage with sci-fi fantasy. It’s got its own upside. But anything that, over time, takes you further and further away from the experience of just the hardware of what it is we do…,” he trailed off.

“We have all of this product that is either already part of something or a brand,” Ruffalo concurred, before noting that this is “a time where people are really wondering, ‘Well, what is cinema now after Marvel, after franchises, after IP?’”

Oppenheimer is currently available to rent on digital platforms. Poor Things hits theaters on December 8.