Robert Downey Jr says before choosing ‘I am Iron Man’, he tried other options: ‘They were all super smart-a** lines’

The death of Tony Stark was one of the most important events in MCU history. Iron Man, played by Robert Downey Jr, was the most popular superhero in the cinematic universe and his death in Avengers: Endgame left fans heartbroken.

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If you told that to somebody before 2008’s Iron Man, they would have called you stupid. As previously, the superhero was fairly minor and not at all popular with comic-book readers, let alone the rest of us. Tony Stark was pretty much the face of the MCU, and it is also credited for revitalising Downey Jr’s floundering career.

Stark’s sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame was not to save just the world but also the universe. In the end, Tony Stark snapped Thanos and his army out of existence and dies because of the irreversible damage his body has suffered from the Infinity Stones.

When Tony snapped, he, ever the wise-cracker, replied to Thanos’ “I am inevitable” line with his own mic-drop, “And I am Iron Man”. Now, Downey Jr has spoken about the line, saying he deliberated about more options.

While speaking on HypochondriActor podcast, he said (quoted by TheDirect.com), “Correct answer is ‘I am Iron Man,’ but I had so many alt lines that I wanted to put forward… Oh god, let me think. They were all super smart-a** lines like I was trying to, y’know, dumb stuff like, ‘You are so f***ed’ or whatever. You know what, I’ll have to go back to my notes… I get the Infinity Stones and then have the power to snap and have whatever I wanna have happen — Oh, tha- I was gonna say ‘Oh, snap.‘”

He said it was the idea of one of the editors or writers to use the “I am Iron Man” line as the perfect way to bookend the character’s arc in MCU.

“I’ll tell you why, it was too smart-a** and it was the whole arc of the character and it was, I think… maybe one of our great editors’ ideas, or one of the writers to say we need to go right back to the first film and have his dying words be the words of his origin… We love a bookend,” he said.

The first Iron Man film was also the first MCU film, and its critical and commercial success gave Marvel Studios the confidence to move ahead with the Avengers and so on.