Robert Downey Jr. Looks Unrecognizable With Curly, Balding Hair for New Show ‘The Sympathizer’

Robert Downey Jr. recently began work on his new series The Sympathizer, which has required him to look nothing like Iron Man. Downey looked unrecognizable with red hair and red eyebrows at the series’ Los Angeles set last week. The Sympathizer is based on the 2015 historical novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Downey wore a wig with receding, curly red hair in photos PEOPLE published on Jan. 12. The actor wore a pink shirt under a burgundy jacket, with navy pants and brown shoes. He shaved his head completely before filming began, even sharing a fun video of his sons Exton, 10, and Avri, 8, shaving his head just before Halloween. In November, Downey showed off his bald head at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Governors Awards.

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The Sympathizer stars Hoa Xuande (Cowboy Bebop) as the Captain, a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist spy during the final days of the Vietnam War. He is exiled to the U.S. and leaves during the fall of Saigon in 1975. He becomes enmeshed in the Southern California exile community and becomes a cultural advisor of a Hollywood movie about the war. He is recruited to return to Vietnam to fight the communists. Nguyen, a professor at the University of Southern California, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and published a sequel, The Committed, in 2021.

Downey will reportedly play several supporting roles in the series and is an executive producer. Fred Nguyen Khan, Toan Le, Vy Le and Alan Trong will also star. Park Chan-wook, the acclaimed South Korean filmmaker behind Oldboy, Stoker, The Handmaiden, and Decision to Leave, is directing. Park and Don McKellar (Sensitive Skin) will serve as showrunners. The series is a co-production between HBO, A24, and Rhombus Media, with Cinetic Media and Moho Film.

Sandra Oh, who recently finished work on Killing Eve, also has a recurring role in The Sympathizer. Oh will play Sofia Mori, a feminist who is in the middle of a love triangle. Kieu Chinh (Dynasty) will star as the Captain’s mother. Nguyen Cao Ky Duyen, who is famous in Vietnam for hosting the variety show Paris By Night, also has a recurring role.

Downey recently produced the Netflix documentary Sr., about his father, the late maverick avant-garde filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. Downey also stars in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming biopic Oppenheimer as U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss. The movie opens on July 21.