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Robert Downey Jr. is looking forward to exploring new opportunities now he's finished playing Iron Man.
The 54-year-old first portrayed billionaire Tony Stark in 2008's Iron Man and reprised the role a number of times over the next 11 years, with him playing no other character between 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron and this year's Avengers: Endgame, during which Tony Stark sacrifices himself to defeat the evil Thanos and his army.
In an interview with Off Camera with Sam Jones, Downey Jr. reflected on the next phase of his career and said he was looking forward to doing something different.
"I had an incredible 10-year run that was creatively satisfying. It was very, very, very hard work and I dug very deep, but I have not been forced to explore the new frontier of what is my creative and personal life after this," he said. "By creating and associating and synergising with Tony Stark and the Marvel Universe... and being a good company man but also being a little off-kilter and being creative and then getting into all these other partnerships, it was a time when it's like... owners start looking like their pets... occasionally you would pull back from it and go, 'Let me stop, let me get off the teat of this archetype and let me see where I stand.' And you can feel really buffeted, you can get really spun out by it."
The actor explained that he prepared for this transition and made sure his career didn't "fall apart" post-Endgame, and confessed that having such a long-running relationship with the Marvel is "the closest I will ever come to being a trust fund kid," because "there's always a dependency on something that feels like a sure thing."
Downey Jr. then expressed the importance of maintaining an "aesthetic distance" between himself from his work.
"I'm not my work. I'm not what I did with that studio. I'm not that period of time that I spent playing this character," the star insisted. "And it sucks because the kid in all of us wants to be like, 'No! It's always gonna be summer camp and we're all holding hands and singing Kumbaya. Isn't it?' It's like, 'No! Snap out of it.'"
Downey Jr. has already filmed The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle and Jamie Foxx's comedy All-Star Weekend and is set to reprise his role of detective Sherlock Holmes for a third instalment in the franchise.