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Crave Online: How did you get Iron Man 2?

Crave Online: Was Tom Cruise ever supposed to be the lead in Tropic Thunder?

Justin Theroux: No, in my mind Ben was always going to be that part. He's done aging action stars well before, previously in The Ben Stiller Show. So when we were writing it, Ben I think at certain moments was like, "I don't know, should I do the part?" I was like, "Come on, dude." He didn't want to direct it, he didn't want to, he was like, "Oh, I'll do it, I'll direct it, I won't direct it, I'll do it." So then eventually the right thing happened. He did it and directed it.

Crave Online: How did screenwriting come about for you?

Justin Theroux: It's totally ridiculous.

Crave Online: Have you been working on things over the years?

Justin Theroux: I have. Ben was actually kind of was the first, he originally had the idea, he probably said when he was doing Empire of the Sun. Then I met him I guess in like the mid-90s and he sort of pitched the idea to me, a bunch of actors going to do a boot camp and getting post traumatic stress disorder or something. It was a funny idea. It was sort of funny in like a sketchy kind of way. We were like, "Well, how could you extend that into a movie?" And at the time, I was like writing pages for this great screenplay that I was going to write and he didn't like it. He was like, "This is good, the dialogue's really good. The dialogue's great." So he was my early, early champion of writing. I was sort of more focused on acting but I kept writing, writing. Then he was like, "I think we should write Tropic Thunder" or at that point, The Vietnam Project. So we started passing ideas back and forth and writing scenes. I would write something and send it to him and he would edit it and he would send it back to me and then I would work on that, et cetera et cetera. Then Etan [Cohen] came in and wrote a draft. We handed him a bunch of scenes and said, "Make some sense of that." He did a draft and then we went back to work on that draft and changed it more and again. It jus sort of blossomed but it was one of those things where we were sort of like, I don't know. I don't know how I started becoming a screenwriter. Just I was very lucky and it started to happen. I started to have the patience for it.

Crave Online: Did Tropic Thunder prepare you for writing action?

Justin Theroux: Yeah, yes and no. We worked hard on our action scenes in Tropic but yeah, I don't know. It'll be sort of an experience. I have no real good reason to be sitting in the chair I'm in but I'm grateful for it.

Crave Online: Were you worried about things like the speech about "going full retard?"

Justin Theroux: Yeah, I am. I'm worried. Well, I'm not worried about it because at the end of the day I've sort of rectified it all in my head. The movie takes a lot of shots all over the place but we did our due diligence and really tried hard to focus on keeping the joke on the actors. When you get to put funny stuff in the mouths of really pretentious douche-y actors, that's the fun of the movie. So again, that kind of celebrity and obviously we're exaggerating it but the air gets very rarified when you're at the place in your career. So the fun was just letting the air out of those egos and putting them in a situation where they're back at square one.