Wait! Hear us out. Downey is at his very best (and most eccentric) in the HBO series taking on four wildly different roles

Is there ever such a thing as too much Robert Downey Jr? The Sympathizer, the new HBO series based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen about a Viet Cong spy (played in the series by Hoa Xuande) in LA in the years after the Vietnam War, proves the limit does not exist.

In it, he stars as not one, not two, but four separate characters: A shady CIA agent being double-played by Xuande’s ‘The Captain’, an Orientalist, fetishising university professor, a congressman kowtowing to his new anti-communist Vietnamese refugee base and a Francis Ford Coppola-esque film director making a Vietnam war film. Each role is distinct with very specific aesthetics and vibes – the Hunter S. Thompson chaos of his CIA agent starkly contrasts his effeminate, bald lecturer. They all serve the same purpose, as proxies for the ways our lead Vietnamese character is exploited by white men. But beyond that, every character has another inescapable and deliberate throughline: it’s impossible not to see Robert Downey Jr.

Back in 2008, Downey starred as an egotistical actor cosplaying as a Black man in the Ben Stiller comedy Tropic Thunder. It’s one of those classic roles unceremoniously dumped in the ‘You couldn’t make this today’ bucket which, while almost certainly true, misses the point somewhat (it was supposed to be unsavoury within the movie).

If anything, that role proved that, even in a heavy disguise, there’s a certain Downey-esque quality that can’t help but shine through. It’s that same charismatic, glinting charm that moulded the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe around it and made the potential tedium of a clean-sweep awards run for his role in Oppenheimer something to look forward to (at least his speeches wouldn’t be boring!).

Downey’s roles in The Sympathizer, in a weird way, are spiritually linked to Tropic Thunder. He’s not meant to blend in – the point is that you’re supposed to be painfully aware that this is the same man playing different characters, even though, in the world of the series, he is four distinct people. It’s the kind of move that shouldn’t work, but does. The director of the series, Korean cinema maestro Park Chan-wook, said: “It was very important to find a fine line in terms of going with Robert playing multiple roles, because this concept itself, him playing different characters, was very important. It represented four different faces sharing one body, which is representing America as a whole.”

For actors, there are arguably two ideal routes: You either blend into each role, acting as a shell for each new character, or you make yourself such a superstar that you get given the same roles over and over again. Of course, Oppenheimer proved that his tenure in the MCU didn’t erase Downey’s chameleonic talent, but in The Sympathizer, he somehow manages to straddle both.

Chan-wook needed both a character actor and a movie star. It’s hard to imagine anyone else pulling it off like RDJ.