In some ways, Downey and Thorne’s friendship mirrors the relationship between Tony and Riri in the pages of Marvel Comics. Created by Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato, Riri made her debut in INVINCIBLE IRON MAN (2015) #7, introduced as a scrappy young genius who studies at MIT and builds a state-of-the-art armored suit. Riri never takes up the Iron Man mantle, instead choosing to forge her own identity as the hero Ironheart. But she and Tony strike up a friendship, bonding over their shared love of engineering and their call to heroism.
In their conversation, Downey and Thorne discussed the similarities and differences between their two characters. After all, one is a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist and the head of a major tech company, and the other is a scrappy young kid from Chicago who crafts her suits out of spare parts. But both share a dream of using technology to help protect the world around them.
“[Riri] didn’t go seeking this hero mantle at all,” Thorne explains. “She started pursuing it for very different reasons. We see in the comics how she took the name because she lost her best friend and her stepfather from a gunshot wound to the heart. That is where the need and the desire to cloak herself [and] protect herself and her community, where all of that came from. That is very familiar to Mr. Tony Stark over there, wanting to cloak the world in a suit of armor.”