Unlike other, more culturally acceptable Hollywood race-swapping depictions—say, Rob Schneider's exciting work in the ugly-Asian-caricature arts, or even the Wayans brothers' attempt to slip into the alabaster skin of two chihuahua-toting cruise line heiresses—blackface steadfastly remains as reviled and controversial as ever. Which brings us, courtesy EW.com, to this first glimpse of Ben Stiller's "epic action comedy" Tropic Thunder—a movie he first conceived of as a young extra on the set of Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun. (Why does that one detail suggest what we might be looking at here is Stiller's own Heaven's Gate?) In it, Robert Downey Jr. plays an actor so committed to craft, he becomes African American: