Robert Downey Jr.’s return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, announced Saturday at San Diego Comic-Con, would have been a surprise any way you slice it. But the fact that he’s not returning to play Iron Man, founder of the Avengers, but to play Doctor Doom, archenemy of the Fantastic Four, is nearly bewildering.
One question has rung out particularly loudly in the wake of the news: How can Downey Jr. play Doom when everybody in the MCU is already familiar with his face as Tony Stark? Sure, Marvel Comics has had Tony Stark become Doctor Doom, and Victor von Doom has become Iron Man. It’s a 60-year-old, continually running comic book continuity, my friend. Who hasn’t been Doctor Doom or Iron Man? Pretty sure I was Iron Man for an issue or two in 1989.
But there’s one really simple answer to this question. It’s an obvious step toward getting Doctor Doom right, yet it’s something Hollywood has steadfastly refused to do until now.
Downey Jr. should keep that fucking mask on.
Image: John Romita Jr./Marvel Comics
It’s well known that Hollywood struggles with how to portray fully masked characters. Screen actors don’t like signing up for roles where they are not actually recognizable on screen, getting that star recognition that might turn them into (or keep them as) household names. Any actor might be skeptical about a role where their metaphorical hands — which is to say, their literal face — are tied behind their back.
Karl Urban insisted on keeping his helmet on in Dredd, but called it a “very challenging process.” Spike Lee admitted in the director’s commentary of Inside Man that he tweaked the movie’s script after hearing Clive Owen’s concerns. Marvel movies have historically made tons of concessions in this area: Spider-Man, Ant-Man, the Wasp, Black Panther, Iron Man, and War Machine are constantly whipping off their masks or helmets for pivotal conversations, even in the thick of combat. The innovation of the inside-the-helmet camera view was a brilliant solution to the problem, without which the Iron Man franchise might never have worked.
Previous Fantastic Four movies have dodged the idea of a masked villain by insisting on making Victor Von Doom a supporting character, running his origin story alongside that of the Fantastic Four. Actors Julian McMahon (in the 2005 Fantastic Four) and Toby Kebbell (in the 2015 version) got plenty of establishing screen time for their actual faces before their characters underwent the transformations that left them dependent on masks.
In these movies, not only is Victor Von Doom just some normal guy we get to look at, his mask isn’t even a mask — it’s just his face now, metal fused with flesh. You’d never know this from the Fantastic Four film adaptations, but in the comics, never seeing Doom’s face is kind of the point. It might seem odd to insist that we respect this superhero mask, when the superhero setting is so often about what lies underneath. But Doctor Doom’s mask is different from Spider-Man’s, or Deadpool’s, or Ant-Man’s.
Doom’s comic book origin story, first set down in 1962’s Fantastic Four #5, is classically Faustian. Even after he was warned him not to — and later stories would codify the dissenting voice as Reed Richards himself — Doom meddled in science and magic beyond his ability, it fucked up his face, and he’s never forgiven Reed for being right, or forgiven reality for declining to bend to his will.
The only person who’s ever done anything interesting by showing us Doctor Doom’s actual face is the king of comics himself, Doom co-creator Jack Kirby. In his later career, Kirby made a number of mask-off Doctor Doom sketches that suggested that the ugliness Doom claimed was in reality a single, tiny, superficial facial scar, and that Marvel’s most menacing mask wasn’t required to hide a hideous disfigurement, but was a product of Doom’s inability to countenance anything less than perfection.
What makes Doctor Doom a great villain is that the mask is not like Darth Vader’s theatrical assistive device. Wearing it is a choice. It’s a choice Doom would have made even if he just had a facial paper cut.
His mask isn’t like the Phantom of the Opera’s concession to society’s disgust, either! Creators pull the masks off characters like Vader and the Phantom to invite viewers to empathize with their vulnerability and humanity. But the whole reason Doom succeeds as the ür-supervillain is that he’d rather kill every person in the universe than have them think he might be on their level. As Kirby’s sketches so succinctly put it, Doom’s mask isn’t about shame directed inward. It’s about hate directed outward.
Photo: Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney
But this does pose a problem for live-action adaptations. Not simply in how you find a famous actor other than Doug Jones willing to put their performance in voice, gesture, and presence only — but how you find one who can make that a star performance as well.
As boring and safe and expensive as it may be for Marvel Studios to reach back to a completely known draw like Robert Downey Jr. to play Doom, you can’t deny he’s a great actor, and that playing Doom is a true challenge for him. He’s also an actor who’s already had his time as the literal face of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
So the question isn’t “How do you explain explain why Victor Von Doom looks like Tony Stark?” The solution is before us.
The question is, does Marvel Studios have the guts to give us the Doom we deserve, and never show his face at all?