With McNEAL, Robert Downey Jr. Unleashes 'Digital Downey' on Broadway

The world-premiere production of McNEAL, at Lincoln Center Theater this fall, will feature two eye-opening Broadway debuts. One is the debut of the tigerishly compelling Academy Award-winning actor Robert Downey Jr., who plays Jacob McNeal, an acclaimed author with a keen interest in artificial intelligence.

The other debut is that of Downey’s computerized doppelgänger—a realistic likeness of the actor, rendered in pixels and polygons. “‘Digital Downey,’ we call it for short,” Downey told Paul Wontorek on The Broadway Show.

The "Metahuman,” as it is terrifyingly known, was created by AGBO, an independent studio owned by Downey and Marvel Cinematic Universe directing duo the Russo brothers. Press releases promise "a fusion of technology and theater" and—sounding more and more like something out of a supervillain origin story—that Downey will take on a "new, innovative form." (As Marvel fans know, Tony Stark, played by Downey in the films, creates the artificial intelligence Ultron who, through a glitch in programming, aims to wipe out the human race.)

No more details about the tech or how it functions in the play have been revealed.

Downey shared that, between Avengers films, he underwent the kind of full-body digital scan that has become common behind the scenes of Hollywood's biggest blockbusters. Audiences will get to meet the resulting digital likeness in McNEAL.

By the sounds of it, he underwent the procedure on his own accord, ensuring he had ownership and rights over his digital likeness. “We were capturing this because nowadays it’s almost like insurance against identity theft.”

Despite the proliferation of digital humans at the cineplex, Downey is skeptical that they could ever replace their flesh-and-blood counterparts. “I’ve just seen so many technologies come through that people are like, oh my god, this is a game changer. And 20 minutes later it’s boring.” He added, “This stuff only goes so far. It’ll never be us. We’ll never be it.” Even so, he added, “We have to come to some sort of homeostasis of understanding how to be good stewards of this emerging technology.”

It’s a strange synchronicity that the MCU and McNEAL, in their separate ways, both employ groundbreaking technology while grappling with the implications of artificial intelligence.

"It confronts who we are now—technologically, humanly," said the director Bartlett Sher. "What’s nice about the play is it’s not making some argument about A.I. taking over. It’s much more about how we intersect with and deal with our own levels of imitation, our own levels of creativity. How we take from others—good and bad—and how we assemble thinking. The machine is just mirroring what we already do.”

Apart from the MCU/McNEAL connection, there’s another reason Downey feels like a particularly potent casting choice. In the play, Jacob McNeal is suffering from liver failure; he receives a terminal diagnosis on the day he wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is “maybe not taking the steps in his life that he should be taking,” said the playwright Ayad Akhtar.

Akhtar doesn’t need to explicitly state the parallels between fiction and reality. Around the time Downey received an Academy Award nomination for 1992’s Chaplin, his struggles with substance abuse were well known. In 1999, he was sentenced to three years in prison.

“I mean, it’s incredible to originate this role with Robert who understands humor, but also understands human darkness in a way that I think is really profound,” said Akhtar. “I think he brings a kind of humanity to what we’re doing.”

“He’s everything you think he would be,” said Sher, who also praised the actor’s “beautiful spirit towards taking chances—risks that are really reassuring about what we all should be doing to be better artists. He’s obviously wildly successful, but it’s not because he’s playing it safe. He’s taking big risks and he’s willing to try anything.”

For his part, Downey said he was “absolutely certain” he wanted the part in McNEAL before he was done reading the script, intrigued by what it had to say “about humanity, about why art matters, about why the cultural expression of what it means to be human is still relevant.”

“You just feel like, oh my god, this is a gift.”

Check out the full segment from The Broadway Show below.