After his Oscar win for his role in Oppenheimer, Robert Downey Jr. is back on stage these days with an Emmy-worthy performance.
In The Sympathizer, the miniseries based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by the Anglo-Vietnamese writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, he plays not one, but four different parts. The seven-episode series, co-produced by A24 (the studio behind Everything Everywhere All at Once) and HBO (in Italy soon exclusively on Sky and streaming on NOW), is set at the end of the Vietnam War and follows a spy communist whose name is never revealed (Hoa Xuande) who flees to the United States where he continues to collect intelligence on behalf of the Viet Cong. It was Park Chan-wook's idea to have Downey Inc. do four parts "to symbolize the banality of the horrors of the West", reports the weekly New Yorker. Downey Sr. was reportedly paid approximately two million dollars per episode for the performance.