'Doom' Star Calls Video Game Flick 'One of the Worst Films Ever Made'
Being in Doom nearly doomed star Rosamund Pike’s career.
The actress, who was hot off her role as a Bond Girl in 2002’s Die Another Day, was tapped to be the female lead of director Andrzej Bartkowiak’s 2005 live-action adaptation of the popular shoot-'em-up video game franchise.
Though she felt her action star trajectory got off to a promising start with the 007 film, Doom’s failure quickly put that to an end, a career stumble which Pike reflected on during an appearance this week on How to Fail with Elizabeth Day.
“When I was making Pride and Prejudice, and I was having great fun in my cornfields in my bonnet, I get a call to be in an action franchise. They’re making a cinema version, a narrative version of the video game Doom,” she recalled. “And I think in my bonnet, in my field of hay bales, ‘Yeah, I can do anything. I can jump on this hay bale in my crinoline, so I can certainly go and kill some zombies on Mars.’”
She explained that she was initially supposed to star in the film opposite Ray Winstone, before the film was retooled and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson was cast as the lead instead. It’s then things started to change.
“So suddenly I’m in this film with The Rock, and I realize how utterly ill-equipped I am to be an action star,” said Pike, who add that while Johnson “couldn’t be nicer” to work with, the set became “just a completely different beast” from what the then 24-year-old actress was expecting.
“[Johnson] had a team of macho guys around him. There were weights on the set...Every time a gun was brought out, it was kind of like a holy relic for the Doom fans. There was this whole routine before a take, like a Maori, All Blacks, pre-game warm up. I was just out of my comfort zone, out of my league, out of my depth.”
Doom Was a Notorious Bomb
The movie was eviscerated by critics and currently sits at just 18% on Rotten Tomatoes. It fared even worse at the box office, where it grossed only $58.7 million worldwide against a $60-$70 million production budget.
“The film was an absolute bomb. I mean, I probably could have ended my career. It was just probably one of the worst films ever made. I mean, it was a catastrophe, I think,” said Pike. “I don’t read reviews, but you get the sense like you're lucky to have survived that one. But it wasn’t career ending for The Rock, or me as it turned out.”
As she pointed out, both actors fared just fine after the box office stinker. Pike would later earn an Oscar nom for her work in Gone Girl, won a Golden Globe for I Care a Lot and an Emmy for State of the Union. She also earned acclaim for Saltburn. Johnson, meanwhile, had greater success transitioning from WWE wrestler to actor with the Jumanji and Fast & Furious films.
For Pike, she now sees Doom as a learning experience.
“It was probably after that that I started to do my research, because I didn’t know enough about video games," she shared. “I wasn’t the right kind of girl to be in that. I didn’t want to be the sex symbol. I just wasn’t that person.”
When asked if she’d want to be an action star now, if given the chance, she exclaimed, No!” without hesitation. She then added: “If I’m gonna be one, I want to bloody succeed in it.”