Robert Downey Jr Covers Esquire May 2012

With his new movie "The Avengers" set to hit theaters on May 4th, Robert Downey Jr pitched in on the promotions by scoring the cover of the May 2012 issue of Esquire magazine.

The 47-year-old actor looked dapper in a Gucci suit and tie for the Nigel Parry shot front page while opening up about topics such as his latest role as a father and addiction.

Highlights from Robert's interview are as follows. For more, be sure to pay a visit to Esquire!

On his new son:
"Three weeks ago, we had a bun in the oven, and we were about to have a kid. There was all this trepidation, all this projection, all this anticipation and goodwill and a good vibe about it. But what you're squeezing to the side — or what's in the glove box — is these thousands of forms of fear. And then he was born and they've all just kind of scattered now. It seems like he's always been here."

On being a father:
"I guess here's what's come to me in the last three weeks: That anticipation and fear are going to come back. Am I going to know what to do with them? Does any new parent, even if you're not a first-time parent, ever really know what to do? Only thing you have to do, the only requirement, if you can hack it, is to not transfer your own discomfort in the moment to this fresh soul, right? ... You got to be mindful. I don't want to be so confident in myself. It's that balance between being relaxed enough to not be communicating anxiety and present enough to not be creating the very thing that you were anxious about by being so relaxed — because I've seen that parenting style, too."

On being a hero:
"Do I want to be a hero to my son? No. I would like to be a very real human being. That's hard enough. Every dad casts a shadow, you know? And that shadow is you're disappointed, you're resentful, or you feel so supported and loved you don't understand why life is so hard anyway — or, you know, it's so long and so dark that you can never step out of it, so you might as well not even try. Right? So. So hero to me is not applicable to the human experience.

I think that we all do heroic things, but hero is not a noun, it's a verb."

On addiction:
"A link between addiction and creativity? Horses**t. No, I never told myself that lie.

I'm not saying that the correctly timed intervention here and there is blah blah blah — look, it's valiant to go waste days, weeks, months, and years trying to fish someone you care about out of their own abyss. But if your intuition asks, Is this a big O.K. Corral ego trip on the part of the people who are going to say, 'All right, we're going to go in and handle this'? Because you're not. You're not going to handle s**t. No amount of effort is going to nudge somebody out of a situation that they deem is hopeless. And people sense when there's an ego trip involved, when there's a 'I'm here to save your life!' It's horses**t. It's horses**t. I hate it. That's recovery vulturism."