Robert Downey Jr. reflects on worst thing if he had won Oscar

Robert Downey Jr., who recently received his third Oscar nomination for his performance as Lewis Strauss in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, has had a busy awards season. However, compared to 1993, when he was nominated for his first Academy Award for Best Leading Actor for his performance as Charlie Chaplin in Chaplin, he is in a very different place this year.

During a recent interview on The View, the actor discussed why, in his opinion, winning an Oscar that year at the age of 28 would have been the worst thing for his career.

“I was young and crazy,” Downey Jr. said. “It would have put me under the impression that I was on the right track.”

Al Pacino, who took home the Best Actor trophy for his performance in Scent of a Woman, ultimately defeated the actor.

After receiving his first Oscar nomination, Robert Downey Jr. encountered legal issues again and again. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was arrested and imprisoned multiple times for drug-related crimes.

Downey Jr. has talked over the years about his prior battles with addiction and his sobriety, but he also talked about his 1999 prison year last year, referring to it as "the worst thing that happened to me." Additionally, he described his time in prison as "being sent to a distant planet where there is no way home until the planets align" in an interview with the Armchair Expert podcast.

Robert Downey Jr. played Tony Stark/Iron Man in the 2004 film and reprised the role in multiple movies including Avengers: Endgame. He was nominated for an Oscar for Tropic Thunder in 2009 and has received a recent nomination for Oppenheimer, which has 13 nominations at this year's ceremony.