The jail time, the lousy movies, the sense that the only thing larger than Robert Downey Jr.’s talent is his appetite for self-destruction.

Those days are gone and the 43-year-old Iron Man actor is more than happy to show it off in the May issue of GQ.

Behold the new RDJ, in the best shape of his (very hard-lived) life, throwing back algae shakes, developing the armor of a superhero, and yes, conquering demons.

RDJ on his drug-abusing days: “They tend to come at the time you would imagine they would come. There really should be a training program for people who are going to be in the public eye. Because either you have your head screwed on straight and it’s going to get unscrewed, and that’s really going to make you a wreck, or you come in a wreck and you think that this’ll be the centralizing circumstance. Occasionally it is, for some people. For some people, fame and success is what finishes their thing, because in some twisted way that’s all they ever wanted. I know people like that. They’re like zombies. But they’re complete zombies. They’re done, they’re cool, in a very two-dimensional way. They can move anywhere inside the frame, and they’re well-lit, and it’s fine.”

RDJ on why he chose to play Iron Man: “When Tobey Maguire and I were doing Wonder Boys, we went to see The Matrix, and that was a big deal. I’ve known Keanu for ages. I watched the whole thing happen for him. Then I saw Tobey with his whole Spider-Man thing. And then I saw, in a different way, what Johnny did with the whole Pirates thing. You get to firmly embed yourself in the unconscious of the planet in a way that’s so clearly not important that you don’t have to take it all that seriously. I just thought it would be really fun not just to get to do this—or maybe a couple of these—but also to get to be endorsed by Burger King and Hasbro and Slurpee cups.”