Robert Downey Jr. is looking a bit Javier Bardem on this week’s Rolling Stone cover, right? Sure, he looks great, in a rugged, manly-yet-hip way, but there’s some Bardem happening too. Anyway, we don’t have access to the complete interview, but we have enough excerpts to make it worth your while. There’s even a vague mention of something lovely called a “vaginal parfait”. God I love him. Here’s more from the genius, the weirdo, the lovely RDJ:

After two whirlwind days with Robert Downey Jr. in Los Angeles, Walter Kirn discovers the greatest actor of his generation is a hardass, a flake, a superstar — anything you want him to be. The Up in the Air author profiles the Iron Man 2 superstar in Rolling Stone’s new issue, on sale at newsstands today.

During an introspective day on the beach where Kirn and Downey play word association (and coin the term “vaginal parfait”), the actor opens up about his opposition to drug legalization, his interest in science and conspiracy and his current state of mind, which he describes as “the continual process of transcending fear-based rituals.” During the pair’s second afternoon together, Downey gets gritty, speaking out about the downward spiral that led to his ultimate fall: his incarceration from 1999-2000.

Downey recounts how he’d partied with “the son of a local phenom,” smoking black-tar heroin on a two-day bender, just before getting busted for driving with drugs and guns in his possession. He returned home from jail and started searching for “that great coke” he knew he’d stashed somewhere in the house.

“And here I was needing to anesthetize like never before. The wife has moved out, the kid’s gone, my life is a f-cking babyshambles, and I suddenly make the neuropathic connection that there’s nowhere the coke can be but the garbage, and I f-cking dig in the thing and there it is, and it’s so f-cking pure and so clean and there I am, in my own kitchen, cooking up some rock — no Vicodin, no Valium, nothing to take the edge off, barely a trace of f-cking Absolut Citron left in the fridge, and I just go, ‘This is as good as it gets right now.’ I just go, ‘Bam!,’ triumph of the spirit. And the next thing that happens, I’m in custody within two weeks for even stranger reasons, and the phone rings, and it’s the phenom’s son and he goes, ‘Hey, dude, do you have any more of that opium?’ I, of course, told him it was opium. Never call it heroin, it’s very taboo. But this stuff, this Mexican sludge, just grabbed you by the f-cking heartstrings and tore me apart. All those years of snorting coke, and then I accidentally get involved in heroin after smoking crack for the first time. It finally tied my shoelaces together. Smoking dope and smoking coke, you are rendered defenseless. The only way out of that hopeful state is intervention.”

On being in jail: “When the door clicks shut, then you are safe. There is nothing aside from a rogue correctional officer that can do you harm if you have the right cellie. You are actually in the safest place on Earth. Safe from the intruders.”

On doing drugs with Jack Nicholson: “It was the only coke that ever tasted as good as the coke I did with my dad and Jack.”

On being sober: “The ramifications of a little slip are not what they used to be. It’s not kid stuff anymore.”

On the future: “Now I think, ‘Oh, my God, me and the missus will be [in our L.A. home] until the grandkids attend our funerals.’ We’ll always be here. We’ll never f—ing move from here. Crazy.”

[From Rolling Stone and NYDN]

CB and I were just talking about RDJ’s demons and whether he would ever do something douchey, like cheat on his wife Susan. My thoughts were that RDJ’s demons, should he ever self-destruct again, would be of the drug-and-alcohol variety, not of the cheating-with-randoms variety. That being said, I really don’t think he will self-destruct again. I buy that he’s in a better place, probably the best place in his life, and that he’s committed to Susan and staying sober. Bless him.

RDJ on the cover of Rolling Stone, via RS.