It’s official: Iron Man loves Ironheart. While we didn’t get a crossover with the two heroes in the first season of the Disney+ limited series, we did recently get a nearly 14-minute conversation between Robert Downey Jr. and the show’s star, Dominique Thorne, in which the former gushed over how the show’s first episode managed to fit a Marvel movie’s worth of world-building into just 45 minutes.
If anyone knows what goes into a Marvel film, it’s the man who has appeared in 10 MCU flicks. Speaking about the Ironheart series premiere, Downey praised the episode’s ability to introduce a new character in Riri Williams while quickly establishing the impetus of her journey, developing the supporting cast, and complicating the show’s emotional core by giving her a dead friend as her AI sidekick. To the most important actor in the history of the MCU, Thorne ran “the whole gamut of an MCU film in 40 minutes.”
He’s not wrong. What made Ironheart one of my favorite shows of 2025 is how ambitious the storytelling was from the very start. In the first episode alone, the show explores the world’s obsession with iron suits after Tony Stark’s death, centers the Iron Man legacy on intelligence rather than money by having Riri build a suit out of scrap metal, and uses childhood trauma to justify the creation of her AI assistant. Each of those story beats could’ve been entire episodes on lesser Marvel series.
Beyond his love of the show’s storytelling, Downey also explained how Tony Stark and Riri Williams are “twin flames.” It all begins with the heart. Tony Stark’s journey starts in Iron Man after one of his weapons explodes and a piece of shrapnel gets dangerously close to his heart. That injury—and Ho Yinsen (Shaun Toub) using an electromagnet to keep the shrapnel from reaching his heart—inspires the creation of the arc reactor, Stark’s most important invention. Riri’s heart is physically intact when her Ironheart journey begins, but Downey sees a philosophical connection between their origin stories.
“In this iteration, the heart is not only [about] going home, but also this disparity and inequity, and knowing she can only do as much as she can do.”
When this video was shot, he’d only watched the first three episodes of the show and he hints at a second conversation between the two that will take place after he finishes the series. Let’s all hope we get more intergenerational chats to push the superhero genre forward.