Anyone who’s been to the theaters this summer, knows that Robert Downey Jr. was one of the biggest highlights. (Okay, there was that small, $185 million production The Dark Knight.) But with the success of Iron Man and now Tropic Thunder, Downey is as in demand as they come.
Upcoming, he’ll be working with director Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch) on a Sherlock Holmes project. It is one of two features to feature the famous sleuth. Recently, in Premiere magazine, Downey talks about what his character and the film will be like. He says Holmes is a buff bare-knuckle boxer and martial arts expert in addition to a detective.
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.”
