On an episode of the (hilarious) new podcast “WTF With Marc Maron†last week, Marc riffed with Zach Galifianakis, who was on the New Mexico set of the upcoming Todd Phillips comedy Due Date, in which Zach and Robert Downey Jr. play a slacker and a high-strung father-to-be forced to go on a road trip. After listening to Marc and Zach goof around about alpacas, Scientology, and other random subjects, our ears perked up when Zach started telling Marc about a mysterious Hollywood figure that Robert Downey Jr. supposedly shared with him: the legend of the mask man.
[During a discussion about how Zach can no longer hitchhike because he’s famous]:
Zach: “I think Robert was telling me that he knows a mask maker that people use to go out in public. He alluded to it, but I thought maybe he was joking so I didn’t ask a lot of questions, but I’ll definitely follow up on it because that would be amazing. This guy, like, will take a mold of your face, Robert was saying, and alter it so you can look like, you don’t look like …
Marc: But wouldn’t people say, “Why are you wearing a mask?â€
Zach: But, no, it looks so … it’s not a mask, it’s a prosthetic type of thing, you can alter your forehead or something.â€
Who knows if either guy was joking, but RDJ does seem to have a mask fascination: He told the press he wished he could go to Comic-Con in a Mexican wrestling mask a few years ago, and he wears several masks in photos in this month’s issue of Esquire. And, of course, there’s Iron Man. We guess the takeaway here is that if you see someone who looks exactly like Robert Downey Jr. (or Zach Galifianakis) but with a different forehead, leave that person alone, but tell your friends all about it!