Well dressed and weird, cosmic and cool, Robert Downey Jr.

Robert Downey Jr. is truly weird, but it's the kind of weird that is just so cool. At 23 he is one of Hollywood's hottest young actors, having taken our cinema screens by storm recently with three leading roles, running the gamut from burnt out LA rich kid in Less Than Zero, through 60s flower child in 1969, to crusading yuppie lawyer in True Believer with James Woods. In his latest film, Chances Are, he plays an average 80s guy who suddenly discovers that he died in the 60s. The film is a comedy about reincarnation, though Downey himself still has to figure out the meaning of life.

"If I knew that I wouldn't still be in the reincarnation cycle," he says with typical Los Angeleno expansiveness. "I'd be a free-floating mass of energy the size of a walnut... I'd be fucking with the tides." Such a cosmic consciousness is hardly surprising given his first break into celluloid, provided by his cult-film-making father. "Got any hair on your balls?" were the immortal first lines of the five-year-old Downey who played a dog in one of Downey Sr.'s movies. Since then he hasn't looked back.

The self-proclaimed "best dressed man in the industry," Downey's Hollywood home is wall-to-wall Armani and Gaultier, but he doesn't want anyone to think that he's selling out for a flashy wardrobe. "I like going out there and shocking a couple of heads," he says. "The one thing that I'd have to think about is explicit sex with an armadillo - give me a weekend and I'll let you know."

Like they say, weird.