Robert Downey Jr. recounts ’90s prison experience: ‘You could feel evil in the air’

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Robert Downey Jr. has opened up about his time in prison during the late 1990s as he battled drug addiction.

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The Oscar nominee was arrested in 1996 on drugs and weapons charges and was sentenced to three years of probation and required to undergo mandatory drug testing.

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After missing a court-ordered drug test, he was jailed for nearly four months in the Los Angeles County jail the following year.

He landed in prison again after skipping another drug test, and was sentenced to three years of prison in 1999.

Downey has long-since been sober and resurrected his career by helping kick-start the Marvel Cinematic Universe with his portrayal of Tony Stark in the first Iron Man movie. But during an appearance on the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman, Downey opened up about his harrowing experience behind bars.

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“I’m gonna try to give you the flashcards: I’m in court, I’m being over-sentenced by an angry judge, and at some point he said something in Latin,” Downey, 58, recalled. “And I thought he was casting a spell on me.”

Downey recounted how he was jeered by his fellow inmates once when he went to the shower with his underpants on backwards.

“I remember walking out at one point when I hopped out of my cell to go to the shower, by the way, this would be the best soundbite, and I didn’t know it but I was a little spun out and I had my underwear on backwards,” Downey Jr. recalled. “I remember eliciting some strong chuckles and jeers from my fellow inmates.”

But the experience left the actor shaken.

“You could just feel the evil in the air, and that was no trouble at all because it was kind of like just being in a really bad neighbourhood,” he said. “There was no opportunity there. There was only threats. Everyone is going to take your wallet, so watch it.”

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Downey said stepping out into the prison yard was like being “sent to a distant planet where there is no way home until the planets align.”

“For me, there’s worse things that could have happened than being sent to an institution, by far,” Downey added, acknowledging his luck in not dying from a drug overdose. “However, we can only go by what we know, and I would imagine if I had to guess, that was the worst thing that happened to me.”

Remarkably, Downey fell into a rhythm during his prison stay and said his time in incarceration was made easier by not letting himself become a victim.

“As long as you have a willingness to do harm, it is unlikely that you will be targeted. It really is that thing of what is the difference between acting like you’re willing to do harm and being willing to do harm,” he said.

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The Sherlock Holmes star added, “We are programmed to, within a short amount of time, be able to adjust to things that are seemingly impossible. Day 15 was a ball. By day 15 I’m playing, literally, I’m dialed in.”

After he was arrested again in 2001, Downey was written off his comeback role on TV’s Ally McBeal.

Shortly afterwards, his rep told the Associated Press that Downey was now ”in charge of his own destiny.”

Downey met his wife and now producing partner Susan in 2003 while he was filming Gothika and the pair were married in 2005.

“I think he saw what we had,” Susan said of his transformation in an interview with Harpers Bazaar in 2009. “There was something magical there.”

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Twitter: @markhdaniell

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