The Sympathizer, the new HBO limited series from Park Chan-Wook and Robert Downey Jr., premieres next month, and it couldn’t come at a more perfect time. Aside from Park being behind the camera for the first time since 2022’s Decision To Leave, Downey is riding high off his recent Oscar win and is apparently making a meal of being able to act again. Now that Christopher Nolan has resurrected his dwindling credibility (his words), he’s playing a host of roles for Park, including what appears to be a movie director reminiscent of a scene out of Tropic Thunder. See that? You can go home again.
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Set during the final days of the Vietnam War, the series follows a half-French, half-Vietnamese former communist spy (Hoa Xuande) living the good life in sunny Los Angeles. Unfortunately, a wily and shape-shifting Robert Downey Jr. has other plans. (Downey’s character wants him to do spy stuff again.)
The funky-as-all-hell trailer for this show about a bi-racial, bi-lingual synthesis of incompatibilities has a lot of things: Shots of spies tied to a gurney with bolts sticking out of their heads as a masked scientist looms over them, a quick tease of our man putting on Groucho glasses, or a fleeting glimpse of a microfilm camera. All that’s well and good, but at least The Sympathizer goes the extra mile and ends the trailer by listing the cast as “And Academy Award Winner Robert Downey Jr.” several times.
Now, obviously, we have some qualms with their decision to leave the chyron reading “And Academy Award Winner” for each shot of him in a different disguise. In a perfect world, the trailer would end with “Robert Downey Jr., Robert Downey Jr., and Robert Downey Jr.,” closing on a shot of him smacking his big old prosthetic belly. That wasn’t the case, but we’ll live.
The Sympathizer debuts on Sunday, April 14, on HBO and MAX.