Robert Downey Jr. Read Some Of The Mean Things Critics Have Said About Him At The Critics’ Choice Awards: ‘Amusing As A Bed-Locked Fart’

Robert Downey Jr. earned some of the best reviews of his life for Oppenheimer, his return to serious dramatic work post-Marvel. He’s even nabbed a bunch of awards for it. One of them was for Best Supporting Actor at the Critics’ Choice Awards. Is he grateful Of course! But he couldn’t resist reading some of the more colorful slams certain reviewers threw at him.

“The first one’s like a Haiku, ‘sloppy, messy & lazy.’ Next one’s more metaphoric, ‘like Pee Wee Herman emerging from a coma.’”

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“I was thinking this morning, I love critics,” Downey told the crowd, some of whom couldn’t resist chuckling. “You know, they’ve given me such beautiful feedback, really just so many great moments, and some of it is so poetic.”

And so he read some of the rare pans he’s received for playing Lewis Strauss, the hissable bureaucrat who surreptitiously targeted J. Robert Oppenheimer over some perceived slights. Here are the ones he read out, though he didn’t attribute them to any specific writer:

Of course, Downey earned plenty of raves, some hailing it as not only a return to form after a decade-plus of mostly playing Tony Stark, but perhaps his finest work over his long, storied career. But you gotta take the sour with the sweet, and those insults aren’t half-bad. Besides, he could have read out the reviews for Dolittle.