Robert Downey Jr. Playfully Calls Out Gwyneth Paltrow’s Endless MCU Confusion at Beverly Hills Gala

At THR’s Women in Entertainment event, Downey Jr. honors Paltrow with heartfelt praise — and hilarious reminders that she still can’t remember her own Marvel movies.

Robert Downey Jr. is once again proving that no one roasts Gwyneth Paltrow better than Tony Stark himself — especially when it comes to her famously foggy memory of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

At The Hollywood Reporter’s 2025 Women in Entertainment breakfast gala at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Downey Jr. took the stage to present Gwyneth Paltrow with the prestigious 20th annual Sherry Lansing Leadership Award. And while his tribute was filled with admiration for his longtime friend and former MCU costar, he couldn’t resist highlighting her now-legendary confusion over Marvel movies — including the ones she personally appeared in.

“[She’s] impossibly intelligent, yet forever confused by the basic tenets of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its inhabitants,” Downey Jr. joked, earning laughter from the audience. He recalled a moment when Paltrow asked him who Tom Holland was — despite sharing the screen with him repeatedly.

“‘Who’s that?’” Paltrow once asked, he explained. “That’s Spider-Man… You’ve done four movies with him.”

The playful jab references a long-running internet joke about Paltrow’s spectacularly hazy Marvel memory. She has repeatedly gone viral for forgetting major MCU details — most famously the time she insisted she wasn’t in Spider-Man: Homecoming, until Jon Favreau and chef Roy Choi calmly walked her through the entire scene on Netflix’s The Chef Show.

Her confusion resurfaced again in 2024 when she questioned Downey Jr.’s casting as Doctor Doom, commenting on Instagram: “I don’t get it, are you a baddie now?”

But Downey Jr. didn’t stop at teasing. He praised Paltrow’s extraordinary balance of Hollywood work, motherhood, and the building of her lifestyle empire, Goop — which he jokingly noted she developed “between takes on the set of Iron Man.”

As Pepper Potts and Tony Stark, Paltrow and Downey Jr. anchored some of the MCU’s most pivotal emotional arcs, from the original Iron Man (2008) to their farewell in Avengers: Endgame (2019). And despite her forgetfulness, their partnership remains one of the franchise’s most beloved.

With Avengers: Doomsday slated for release on December 18, 2026, fans can only hope Paltrow studies up on her MCU lore — or that Downey Jr. will be there once again to lovingly remind her who’s who.

One thing is certain: when it comes to Marvel memories, Gwyneth Paltrow remains the MCU’s most unintentionally entertaining mystery.