14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, Robert Downey Jr. walked out on a Channel 4 News interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy, when he was pressed to answer questions that he deemed out of place and way too personal for the occasion. He was there to promote a movie, he said a couple of times before he got up and walked out.
The questions that bothered him so much had to do with his political beliefs and his troubled past, particularly the death of his father and his raging drug addiction.
On Howard Stern the other day, RDJ explained why he walked out on the interviewer. His only regret is that he didn’t do it sooner.
Bottom-feeding muckraker, syphilitic parasite, clown
The video embedded below is of the interview, which was taped during a very busy week of promotion for Marvel’s upcoming “Avengers: Age of Ultron.”
As mentioned, the interviewer’s name is Krishnan Guru-Murthy, he works for Channel 4 News and mostly handles political and cultural stuff. He does celebrity interviews too, but they often focus on serious stuff as well. He is famous online for antagonizing Quentin Tarantino during a promo chat for “Django Unchained” (2012) with a question on the relation between on-screen and real-life violence.
He was the guy that got Tarantino saying, “I am not your slave, you are not my master. I am not your monkey” when he refused to answer the question.
He tried to get RDJ to talk about more serious topics as well, but the result wasn’t what he expected because, after several attempts to change the subject, the actor simply got up and walked out, reproaching him that the chat was “a little too Diane Sawyer-y” for his taste.
He was definitely holding back in his appreciation of the experience, but he’s not doing that with Howard Stern.
“I’m one of those guys who I’m always assuming the social decorum is in play, and that we’re promoting a superhero movie, a lot of kids are going to see it, and that just has nothing to do with your creepy dark agenda,” he says. “I hated feeling all of the sudden ashamed and obligated to accommodate your weirdo [expletive].”
He continues by calling Guru-Murthy a “bottom-feeding muckraker,” “syphilitic parasite” and a “clown,” and admits that he wishes he’d walked out sooner because there is nothing in his contract with Marvel that forces him to sit through such an interview.
Audio from the Stern interview is available on SoundCloud, but *please be advised that it contains graphic language that might offend.
Guru-Murthy tells a different story
In case you missed it, Guru-Murthy posted his version of the controversial interview in an op-ed on The Guardian site, over the weekend.
He explained that he always engaged in this type of serious conversations with the celebrities he interviewed, and that they always assumed it would happen the moment they agreed to sit down with him.
He denies he had a hidden agenda of getting RDJ angry on camera, and expresses disappointment that he wasn’t able to answer more serious questions - or, at the very least, telling him outright that he wasn’t willing to take personal questions.
Guru-Murthy argues that RDJ was definitely promoting a movie, but he wasn’t: he was there as a journalist, and as one, he wanted answers to questions that would have interested his readers. He wasn’t there to make small chit-chat and conduct a fluff interview, which, somehow, was what RDJ expected.
He is not apologetic for what happened. Then again, neither is Robert.
