If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or get my blog updates by email. Thanks for visiting!

Robert Downey Jr. career seems to be at its peak with the release of Tropic Thunder last week. He has sort of cemented himself as a top box office draw. Now with the news that he will play Sherlock Holmes in the next Guy Ritchie movie he is surely going take up big steps in his versatility. Sacha Baron Cohen will also be playing Sherlock in another adaptation of the movie. Downey spoke to Variety about the role saying he is a buff bare-knuckle boxer and martial arts expert in addition to a detective. Although they’re not shooting until October, it’s refreshing to hear him talking about finding this character already.

Downey Jr. explains that this will be like Zack Snyder’s 300, “the idea of doing a period piece where you don’t modernize it, you just realize how modern it was.” He adds of this film, that “in 1891, it was incredibly modern. And Sherlock Holmes is such a great character to be able to play.” Imagining a world with Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes that Guy Ritchie has dreamt up definitely excites me, because Ritchie is such a unique and stylistic director. And Downey Jr. assures us that this isn’t going to be a stylized period piece like we all-too-often see with films like Elizabeth: The Golden Age. “I love the idea of doing a period piece without trying to be too stylized.” He also adds more about the physicality of the character.

“We’re both martial arts enthusiasts and historically, in the real origin stories of Sherlock Holmes, he’s kind of a bad-ass and a bare-knuckle boxer and studies the rare art of baritsu [fictional martial art created by Doyle for the final Holmes story, 1901's The Adventure Of The Empty House]. If you look baritsu up, they can’t even really tell you what it is, so it gives us a lot of leeway.”

Robert Downey Jr has been toppling this whole year and with the Tropic Thunder character he has sort of peaked with his comedic timing. He plays an Australian actor embodying a black soldier named Sgt. Osiris. He finished the interview with Premier by saying Here I am, promoting a movie while my heart says I should not be promoting Tropic Thunder at all because I need to have my ham radio going for Sherlock Holmes. It’s mandatory that I get this inspiration, and what if I miss that train? I’ll be depriving the moviegoing public of what it is that I promise them I’ll be able to do, which is, more often than not, deliver.”