The nickname Robert Downey Jr earned in prison: “You just can’t make this stuff up”

Posted On February 15, 2025February 15, 2025

Millions of people worldwide can attest that nicknames are a difficult thing to shake off. Sometimes, a moniker coined in childhood can follow someone around for their entire life, or an office designation will escape the workplace and live forever. On the plus side, Robert Downey Jr didn’t have to worry about his handle becoming Hollywood parlance, if only because he got it in prison.

The actor had spent almost his entire career struggling with substance abuse issues, but it was in the late 1990s when he reached his lowest ebb. Several times over, in fact. He’d already been arrested several times on drug charges, and no amount of effort on the part of either his friends or the legal system could keep him on the straight and narrow.

Sean Penn and Dennis Quaid effectively kidnapped him to take him to rehab in 1996, only for Downey Jr to escape several days later. Later that year, he was arrested on possession and weapons charges, was discovered asleep in his neighbour’s bed while on parole, and spent six months behind bars the following year when he missed a court-ordered drug test.

Even when it looked as though a comeback was on the cards, the star couldn’t outrun his demons. He won a Golden Globe for his work on Ally McBeal, only to get fired from the show in April 2001 when he was arrested again. His first appearance on the series came in October of the previous year, three months after he’d secured an early release from a three-year jail term doled out in August 1999.

Not that he disappeared completely from the spotlight, though, with Downey Jr happy to give the public an insight into his life when he was interviewed from the confines of a California cell block in August 2000, where he tried to put a brave face on his trials and tribulations as inmate number P50522.

Revealing that he was sharing a dorm with “recovering pimp” Figueroa Slim, “Old Valley Gangster” Timmons, prison chapel clerk Sugar Bear, and “white trash” Big Al, it seemed only fair that his four cellmates would give the Academy Award-nominated actor a nickname of his own.

“I didn’t tell you my new handle,” he felt compelled to point out to Vanity Fair. “They call me Mo’ Downey. Like, ‘You Mo’ Downey now’. You just can’t make this stuff up. All these years, my favourite thing to do in life was laugh until the tears well up. Now I’ve found that humour is something as valuable as an Aqua Lung is to divers.”

It remains unknown if Downey Jr stayed in touch with Figueroa Slim, Timmons, Sugar Bear, and Big Al when he was granted his release, but probably not. Even then, it would be another couple of years before he finally hopped onto the wagon and stayed there permanently, leaving ‘Mo’ Downey’ as a thing of the past.