Cigarette in one hand, cup of coffe in the other, Robert Downey Jr. shuffles into the living room of his Los Angeles hotel suite and points to the sofa. "I am so there," he says before collapsing in a heap and covering half his body with a blanket.

The actor has two films about to open - The Singing Detective (Oct. 24) and Gothica (Nov. 21) - and he has been answering questions all day. Do you think that he's tired from answering questions about his new movies? Or do you suppose that he is exhausted from fielding endless questions about Robert Downey Jr.? To his credit, he has not ducked the tough questions about the celebrated drug problems. And he says he will continue to answer them gladly - for about six more weeks.

"As of Thanksgiving this year, I am never going to respond to that set of questions again." the actor explained in a matter-of-fact manner that betrayed no sense of bitterness. "I need to put a cap on the topic; I need to set a boundary. As long as I don't move the line in the sand, I think that's fair. Besides, it will give these kinds of interviews the space to move into new frontiers." "I'm not blaming the media for wanting to ask the questions," he added. "Who's responsible for limiting the frontiers up until now? I am."

Well, it's not Thanksgiving yet, so let's get on with it.

The 38-year-old Downey, who looks trim and muscular, says he is clean and sober and works out regularily in a kung fu class. He holds up an athletic bag full of workout clothes and says he will go to the gym after his last interview of the day. He was not a devotee of the martial arts when he went to prison, but he insists that it wouldn't have helped.

"Everything ends up on the floor anyway," he said of prison disagreements. "Even if you're an expert boxer, you wind up on the floor wrestling around. I chose just to stay out of everyone's way. It is a scary place. The closest I can come to describing the experiences is that it must be like active millitary service. It is very unpredictable, and your life is very much at risk. Everybody's life is at risk in there, because everybody in there is dangerous in that situation. So I also became dangerous. I became as dangerous as I could, considering the environment."

It may sound like a cliche, but Downey said prison made him a better human being. Inside those walls, Downey said, he found the answers he needed, not necessarily from therapy but from his own self-discovery. "Therapy doesn't always lead you to the truth," he said. "I have known since I was 15 that everyone creates their own deal. There are no victims, and it is a waste of time to make yourself a victim. When I was done with therapy, all my therapist said was, 'My diagnosis is that you're a miserable SOB.'"

"So how much help could he have been?"

In Concoran, Downey said, he accepted full responsibility for everything wrong he had done with his life that landed him in prison. He said he never forgot that for a second. But there was a moment, he said, upon waking up each morning, when he would forget the mistakes. He would forget where he was. Only for a moment, though. As soon as his head cleared and he realized where he was, he said, he felt "disappointed." But the self-pity didn't last long. He said he kept busy reading books, writing letters and working. More importantly, he kept focused.

"It's important to focus on what's right in front of you," he explained. "It could be the correctional officers sitting in the rotunda, something inside your cell, or whatever you can see out the window. If you focus like that, you don't notice the constraints. Once in a while, someone would get an Entertainment Weekly sent to them and I'd remember that other people were still going about their lives in the world I once was a part of, and there would be this pang in my stomach. I'd think, 'What have I done?' But then I'd go play handball or attend Catholic service or start drawing, and the pang would go away. I just kept getting tougher every day. I decided that it was my job to get tougher, and I became a tougher person than I ever imagined I could."

The son of an independent filmaker and an actress, Downey made his show-business debut at 5 in his father's film Pound. He made three more films with his father and dropped out of Santa Monica High School after the 11th grade to act in the John Sayles mmovie, Baby it's You. He has appeared in dozens of films and, interestingly, played a doomed jonkie in the film Less Than Zero. But he is best known for his Oscar-nominated role in the 1993 film, Chaplin. "If I had been hit by a piece of Skylab at the Chaplin premiere, I would have died believing I had lived a full life," he said. "I had experienced more by the time I was 25 than anyone could ever expect. Despite the misery and lousy childhood, I had had a real nice slice of the pie."

In his next film, Gothica, he plays a therapist opposite Halle Berry. The amazing thing about Downey's career is that he still has one. Despite the legal battles and the public firings, he has managed to maintain a fairly steady acting career. "His tremendous talent is part of the reason," explained Keith Gordon, who directed Downey in The Singing Detective. "But it's more than that. There is something so vulnerable, so honest, so sad and so lovable about him. The audience can sense those things so they keep wanting to see him in movies, and people in the movie industry sense it and keep hiring him."

In the film, based on the British TV miniseries, Downey plays a crime novelist who is hospitalized with a debilitating skin disease (it took up to 6 hours a day to apply the makeup) who teeters between reality and fantasy as he tries to come to grips with his life. It is part film noir, part psychological drama and even part musical. It also hits close to home. The lead character's name is Dan Dark, but it could just as well have been Robert Downey Jr.

"The film is about a man climbing out from the darkness of his soul, and I figured out right away that this could have been about Robert," the film's director said. "In the beginning, I think Robert had a hard time acknowledging that, but near the end of filming, I walked up to him and said, 'You know what this film is about, don't you?' And he said, 'Yes.'"

Downey said the experience of working on The Singing Detective in 2002, shortly after completing his debt to society, was restorative. "It was such cathartic release to work so hard on something so different that I surprisingly wasn't tired when it was over," the actor said. "I felt revitalized."

Downey says he will never go back to his former life. Affecting a sarcastic tone, Downey said, "I just loved it when people said, 'Well, he's not hurting anyone but himself.' I liked that so much that I ran with it for a while. But it's so not true. Drug abuse is wrong. It's not OK. I let down everyone who ever cared about me. I took my life to the 11th hour and the 59th minute. Luckily, the clock didn't strike midnight and I didn't turn into a pumpkin. If the clock had struck, I don't think I would have survived."

Not only did he survive, but his career survived as well. "I never sat in prison and worried about whether I still would have a career when I got out. But I did wonder what I would do next. What do you do when the party's over and you really have to face living your life without drugs? I am finding that it's alot easier to act when you're not tearing yourself up inside. To act is to play an instrument, but how can you play the saxophone when it's filled with Crisco? Right now, all I'm putting into my body are cigarettes and coffee. Those are my last two addictions. And they'll go sooner or later. At this point in my life, I'm going for progress, not perfection."