MTV: Congratulations, Robert. It's been quite a year. Do you have a speech prepared?

RDJ: Yes. [Clears throat.] Gratitude is best expressed with a gifting. What are you going to send to me? You're MTV! I live in the stone age. Send me some cool music!

MTV: We'll get to work on that. You really pursued the role of Tony Stark in "Iron Man," as I recall.

RDJ: Yeah. I chased it like a greyhound after a rabbit.

MTV: Does that make all the critical and commercial success it earned all the sweeter?

RDJ: Absolutely. It's also just a sense of destiny. Favreau and his film Zathura and little Bobby and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang came out on the same goddamn day! And neither of them did much. There was a sense of destiny between us.

MTV: What ran through your head the first time you saw yourself in the Tropic Thunder makeup?

RDJ: I just said that's a beautiful black man. Us Downey's have always somehow been on the cutting, maverick edge of a certain type of storytelling. Ben [Stiller] let me go.

MTV: Does having ridden such a personal and professional roller coaster color your perspective on this status you now have in Hollywood?

RDJ: My life lessons were that the battles have to be hard fought and hard won. I certainly wouldn't wish it on an enemy, but as it stands right now, I'm the actor you're most thankful for. All this stuff does mean something. I grew up in and around MTV. I remember going to the MTV Video Music Awards with Anthony Michael Hall and David Lee Roth, driving down Fifth Avenue in a convertible Studebaker. David was wearing white gloves and tails. I was like, "Dude, is it ever going to get more modern than this?"

MTV: You've just signed on for three more turns as Iron Man. You're in the middle of production on Sherlock Holmes ...

RDJ: Which is hugely kick-ass, by the way.

MTV: Are you worried about overexposure?

RDJ: There's a ton of other stuff I could be doing, but the truth is, if I did nothing else but what I'm already lined up to do for the next five years, it might still be overexposure. I want to do some music again. Strangely, I got a record deal very easily the second time around, five seconds after the weekend grosses [for Iron Man] came in. I probably want to direct. I also want to reclaim a bit of sense of self. After all the stuff I've been through, part of it is just about continuing to heal up. And it's hard to heal up when you're going 210 mph.

MTV: As you begin work on the sequel, what can or should be improved upon from the first Iron Man?

RDJ:Downey: Our idea is that this one brings us much more beneath the armor of Tony. It's one thing to say you're Iron Man, but what does it actually mean to become someone that can shoulder that responsibility? As we noticed at the end, he's still not even responsible enough to read off the card that Shield and the government have given him. He still can't help doing his own thing. He'll have to come to terms with that. I think we could have more excitement. We could use a love triangle or two. I think it's really important to keep up that idea of Tony's interfacing with inanimate objects. He's at his greatest ease when he's faced with machines. I would love to see a little shout-out to the fact that he's an MIT graduate. I love the idea of him inviting over a bunch of super-nerds from MIT who wind up figuring into [Iron Man 3] a little bit.

MTV: You know that "The Avengers" movie is the one every comic book fan is salivating for.

RDJ: That means if we don't get it right, it's really going to suck. It has to be the crowning blow of Marvel's best and brightest, because it's the hardest thing to get right. It's tough to spin all the plates for one of these characters.

MTV: Are you guys discussing Iron Man 2 as a story that will feed directly into "Avengers"?

RDJ: It seems natural that it would at least introduce that factor. My inclination is to bring it another step. The danger you run with colliding all these worlds is that Jon was very certain that Iron Man should be set in a very realistic way. Nothing that happened in Iron Man is really outside the realm of possibility. Once you start talking about Valhalla and supersized super soldiers and jolly green giants, it warrants much further discussion.

MTV: How is Sherlock Holmes going?

RDJ: Guy and I are getting along famously. We're basically two reformed thugs who were somehow picked to reinvigorate this ultra-iconoclastic character. We went right back to the book. I was like, 'Look, he's an expert in single-stick fighting.' And Guy's like, 'He's a bare-knuckle boxer.' We're like, now we can kick some ass!

MTV: What aspects of the story are you most excited about showing off?

RDJ: The stuff that was always in the story that they never had the budget to expose is a field day. The fact that Watson was a ladies man, a sometime degenerate gambler and a wounded veteran of an Afghan campaign, to me, is the most interesting stuff.

MTV: Would you call this an origin story?

RDJ: It's definitely an origin story.

He was once arrested while driving naked in a Porsche, he's done jail time for drugs and has cycled in and out of rehab -- and yet still we love Robert Downey Jr. We find him wildly sexy not just because he is a rogue, but also because he is a romantic hero in the flesh, a bad boy brimming with goodness. Even in his darkest days (remember the time he wandered into a stranger's house and fell asleep on the bed?) we wanted to see him make it back to us with all of his intelligence and wit and charisma intact.

And so he did: 2008 thoroughly redeemed Downey, a man who commits to his roles the way he commits to everything, whether it's drugs, crazy behavior or comebacks. He starred in two of the biggest movies of this year, "Iron Man" and "Tropic Thunder," with performances so resounding that it's hard to imagine that he was ever anything less than a superstar.

No one has ever doubted that Downey, 43, is immensely talented. He was nominated for an Oscar 15 years ago for "Chaplin," in which he proved himself simultaneously adept at physical comedy and poetic drama. He has always radiated sensitivity and devilish charm, even in early movies like "The Pick-Up Artist" and "Less Than Zero," before it was clear the devils he portrayed so accurately might have been his own.

Both "Iron Man" and "Tropic Thunder" could have been awful, and with a less brilliant actor, both of Downey's characters could have come off as thoroughly creepy and unlikable. In "Iron Man" he plays a reclusive genius/arms dealer who transforms himself into a flawed superhero, and in "Tropic Thunder" he burrows under the skin of an absurdly intense method actor named Kirk Lazarus who loses himself so deeply in his role as a black soldier that he forgets he's white. But in each movie, you can practically hear Downey's complicated, quicksilver brain whirring, and you can sense his vulnerability from the last row. While controversy engulfed "Tropic Thunder's" mentally disabled characters, nobody protested Downey's blackface, because it was so perfectly calibrated and perfectly hilarious: As Lazarus explains sweetly, "I'm just a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude!"

But Downey himself is never "just a dude playing another dude." He is an actor "forged in a cauldron of his own genius," as Jack Black teased at the MTV Movie Awards earlier this year. He's been dancing around the void for a long time now, pouring his self-destructive intensity onto the screen, his beautifully chiseled features now weathered just the right amount by the passing of hard time. Even Oprah looked like she might melt when she interviewed Downey and his then-fiancèe (now wife), producer Susan Levin, a few years back.

This year's Sexiest Man Living goes to Downey because he breaks our heart, onscreen and off. He wears his age and experience like a badge of honor and looks comfortable in his own gorgeous skin. The buzz is that Hollywood is looking for an excuse to give him an Oscar this year or next. To give him Salon's highest accolade, we don't need any excuse.

DreamWorks and Paramount have agreed to release fact-based Jamie Foxx-Robert Downey Jr. drama "The Soloist" on April 24 instead of March 13.

DreamWorks was caught off guard last month when Par pushed back the release of "The Soloist" from this year to March 13 at the 11th hour.

The Joe Wright-directed pic was originally to have opened Nov. 21.

In the April 24 slot, "Soloist" will open one week before the official start of the summer box office, which is primetime for moviegoing.

Based on a series of articles by Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, film tells the story of a homeless schizophrenic musician's dream to play at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

After moving "The Soloist," Par relocated Paul Rudd comedy "I Love You, Man" from Jan. 16 to March 20, according to Rentrak. Peter Jackson's "The Lovely Bones" is still tentatively skedded to bow on March 13, but the DreamWorks/Par film is ultimately expected to open later in the year.

Can you tell me about The Soloist, the upcoming Joe Wright movie about a homeless cellist, played by Jamie Foxx, and a reporter, played by Robert Downey Jr.?

We shot on Skid Row, in very difficult circumstances. Joe's a crazy, generous, kind person. I would say the same for Downey. The first day on set, we had this circle, where the actors were up front, and everybody else was around, all the denizens, and Downey, of course, sat in the middle, and when they got to him, he says, "I'm Robert Downey, cell block number ..." and they all just melted.