Robert Downey Jr., who recently garnered his third Oscar nomination for his role as Lewis Strauss in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, has had an eventful awards season. However, compared to 1993, when he was nominated for his first Academy Award for Best Leading Actor for his portrayal of Charlie Chaplin in Chaplin, he is in a totally different place this year.

During a recent appearance on The View, the actor explained why he believes winning an Oscar that year at the age of 28 would have been the worst thing for his career.

“I was young and crazy,” Downey Jr. explained. “It would have put me under the impression that I was on the right track.”

Al Pacino, who won the Best Actor award for his role in Scent of a Woman, eventually defeated the actor.

After obtaining his first Oscar nomination, Robert Downey Jr. faced numerous legal challenges. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was arrested and imprisoned several times for narcotics offences.

Downey Jr. has already discussed his battles with addiction and his sobriety, but he also spoke about his 1999 prison year last year, describing it as “the worst thing that happened to me.” In addition, he portrayed his time in prison as “being sent to a distant planet where there is no way home until the planets align” in an Armchair Expert audio interview.

Robert Downey Jr. played Tony Stark/Iron Man in the 2004 blockbuster and has repeated the character in other films, including Avengers: Endgame. He was nominated for an Oscar for Tropic Thunder in 2009 and was just nominated for Oppenheimer, which has 13 nominations for this year’s Oscars.