Robert Downey Jr. has new Max show about car collection

LOS ANGELES –

Robert Downey Jr. knows he has amassed an impressive collection of classic cars – a car he self-deprecatingly refers to as artifacts of his success.

Despite his expectations of what the “gear should be” when one reaches a certain level of fame and fortune, trophies, it turns out for the actor, aren’t all they’re crazy about. It’s that dissatisfaction that helped inspire “Downey’s Dream Cars,” his latest project debuting Thursday on Max.

“The money and the prizes, that’s never been what motivated me. So I shouldn’t be surprised that it still isn’t,” Downey said at the show’s premiere, held last week at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.

While “Downey’s Dream Cars” is a show for gearheads, it’s not limited to that audience. Downey experiments with the genre in a kind of eco-friendly “Pimp My Ride” that’s also part memoir and part documentary about the latest advances in clean technology.

“That was definitely the idea, was to try to innovate a little bit in this kind of storytelling,” he said.

In each episode, Downey relinquishes control of his prized possessions and has experts modify his classic cars to make them more environmentally friendly by making them electric, converting them to run on biodiesel, or even attaching them with mushroom leather. Downey hopes it will be a glimpse into the future of sustainability and embraces optimism by showing what is achievable now and what technological advancements promise.

It is indeed a show about cars and technology, but Downey brings a surprising amount of tenderness and introspection to it. It’s a window into the way he grew out of a very public struggle with drug addiction that defined his image for years before ‘Iron Man’ and the Marvel Cinematic Universe came along.

He shows a self-awareness of the ‘machismo’ cinematic influences and capitalist values ​​that led him to build such a collection. Throughout the show, Downey interweaves reflections on his life, family, and shifting priorities in recent years, particularly as they relate to the planet’s future.

Susan Downey, a producer who regularly collaborates with her husband, shares his commitment to environmentalism and served as an executive producer for the show.

While she said they both feel a personal responsibility in the fight against climate change, she praised her husband for his efforts to hold companies accountable.

“It’s not to absolve the common people of any responsibility they have, but to really recognize, to make the significant changes, they have to operate at a much higher level,” she said.

The actor has become widely associated with his activism in recent years, especially after he founded FootPrint Coalition, a venture capital fund that invests in climate technology and artificial intelligence.

In the series, Downey bemoans society’s inefficiency and lack of collective will to move forward on these fronts, a frustration that contributed to his decisions to create both the company and the series.

And despite many people’s concerns about the uncharted territory AI has already traversed, Downey believes in its ability to fight climate change and suspects that fears about its capabilities may be, to some extent, unfounded.

“Anytime there’s a really emerging technology that was likely to become important, there’s always a source of fear and hope,” he said, arguing that both should be tempered even though he thinks it could be used for good. “I’m not worried about it, but I think we should have good guidelines for that.”