In a triumphant return to a program he once guest-hosted fabulously with Ben Schwartz, Adam Pally visited James Corden’s Late Late Show and regaled the couch with tales about his late night texting sessions with Robert Downey Jr. Yes, that’s right. The Happy Endings and Mindy Project alum, whose upcoming pilot will follow time-traveling friends across several centuries, receives “weird stuff” from his former boss on the regular. One of these items is the Captain America: Civil War actor’s self-referential use of the phrase “Big Papa.”
It all started when Downey and his wife approached Pally with a business proposition regarding social media. Pally was still working on the spectacular Happy Endings at the time, whereas RDJ’s superheroic climb back up to the top of celebrity was already well under way:
“Robert was like, ‘I want to create a web presence.’ And I was like, ‘Why? You definitely don’t need to do that.’ And he was like, ‘Well I want to anyway.’ So I was in charge of coming up with crazy ideas for him to do on the web. He did none of them. Then he put me in [Iron Man 3] from that, which was awesome.”
Needless to say, their professional relationship quickly transformed into a budding mentor-mentee arrangement of sorts, complete with the aforementioned “Big Papa” moniker and other interesting revelations about Downey’s eccentricity:
“If he saw a movie of mine or something, he’ll text me like, ‘Hey it’s your Big Papa here… You did an exquisite job. You didn’t push. You didn’t pull. You pulled it right down the middle. Home run. Over and out.’ And you’re like, ‘What the hell is going on?'”
Texting with Downey, which Pally said usually happens at around four in the morning, sounds like a fantastic exercise in comedy improvisation. So too does conducting business meetings with him at his house, where Pally claimed he once saw the 51-year-old actor wearing “what looked to be a maternity dress” and a “giant Rasta hat.”
