Iron Man has surprised a 10-year-old boy whose life was changed forever by the Marvel superhero! Robert Downey Jr.
was a guest host on the Ellen DeGeneres Show and met Vincent.
His dad Andy and mom Nicole were also on the show, where they shared Vincent’s journey.
“I have a few questions for y’all. You’re ten now. Lost the ability to speak when he was one and then what happened?” Downey Jr. asked.
The emotional mother replied: “Well, we had a lot of red flags that cropped up. His imagination play; he would line stuff up, he would just spin things for countless hours.”
The couple started consulting with family members about their child’s behavior before Vincent was diagnosed with autism.
When asked about how it felt not being able to express or communicate his feelings, Vincent told the actor that it was ‘painful.’
Andy also said: “It was really painful for him. Now that he has a voice I go back and I ask him, ‘hey, tell me about what you were thinking that day’ or ‘tell me about this time’, and some of the things he talks about is not being able to make friends back then or not having the ability to tell us about what was going on in his life.”
Vincent was 6 when his life started to change, thanks to an Iron Man mask.
Speaking about how he felt with the Iron Man mask, Vincent said: “It helped me talk, it helped me hide my identity from the world.”
Downey Jr., who can relate to the feeling, said: “To me, too, it’s so wild in playing this character, there’s something I think for all of us when you’re able to wear a mask if you’re doing theatre in school or Halloween or whatever, I had a particular affinity, you and I both did with this same mask for some reason.”
After the interview, the actor surprised the family with a $20,000 cheque from Shutterfly.
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Replaced!