- Robert Downey Jr. said the cast of "Oppenheimer" couldn't sit down on set.
- He told Mark Ruffalo that there weren't any chairs on the set of Christopher Nolan's latest movie.
Robert Downey Jr. has revealed that the cast of "Oppenheimer" couldn't sit down after filming their scenes because there weren't any chairs on set.
Downey plays Lewis Strauss, a member of the US Atomic Energy Commission, in the Christopher Nolan movie.
Speaking with former Marvel costar Mark Ruffalo for Variety's "Actors on Actors" series, the stars compared notes on their recent acting experiences: Downey with Nolan, and Ruffalo with "Poor Things" director Yorgos Lanthimos.
"With Nolan, very much unlike Yorgos, but also effective, we were doing screen tests on IMAX, which is crazy," Downey said. "You would go back and sit in your set chair — no, you wouldn't, because there were no set chairs!"
The "Iron Man" star went on to say that the set itself was minimal compared to other Hollywood movies.
"It was very spartan, like 100 people making a watch every day," he recalled.
Downey added: "You kind of feel like you're being stripped of your armor, which he does intentionally. It just creates a different vibe."
The star pointed out that while Nolan's sets are different from others he's worked on, it means the actors are fully immersed in the on-set experience.
"Then you're moving at such a clip that you realize if you're checking your phone and hanging out at craft service — oh, there is no craft service! — that you're going to miss the pace of what he's doing," Downey said.
This isn't the first time that the lack of chairs on Nolan's sets has come up in the "Actors on Actors" series.
In 2020, "The Dark Knight Rises" and "Interstellar" star Anne Hathaway told Hugh Jackman that the director bans chairs on his sets to keep actors focused.
"He doesn't allow chairs, and his reasoning is, if you have chairs, people will sit, and if they're sitting, they're not working," she said.