Rosamund Pike recently did what many actors won’t: she named the worst movie she’s ever made.
Videos by Suggest
Earlier this month, the 47-year-old actor appeared on the aptly named How to Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast to reflect on her 2005 action film Doom. The movie, an adaptation of the popular 90s video game, saw Pike star alongside Dwayne Johnson just three years after her breakout role in the James Bond film Die Another Day.
“It was a promising start… I was picked to be in the biggest action franchise of all time,” the Gone Girl star told host Elizabeth Day of her fledgling career. “So when I was making Pride & Prejudice, and I was having great fun in my cornfields in my bonnet, I get a call to be in an action franchise.”
“They were making a cinema version, a narrative version of the video game Doom. 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 added.
Rosamund Pike Reveals How a Major Cast Shakeup Made Her Realize She was ‘Utterly Ill-Equipped’
Pike revealed that the film was initially supposed to star Sexy Beast actor Ray Winstone. However, in a classic Hollywood switcheroo, Johnson, now 53, ended up taking the lead.
“So suddenly I’m in this film with The Rock, and I realize how utterly ill-equipped I am to be an action star,” she recalled.
“[Johnson] had a team of like macho guys around him, “Pike continued. “There were people pepping him up, 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… I was just out of my comfort zone, out of my league, out of my depth, and the film was an absolute bomb.”
“I mean, I probably could have ended my career,” she reasoned. “It was just probably one of the worst films ever made. I mean, it was a catastrophe, I think. As I said, I don’t read the reviews, but you get the sense like you’re lucky to have survived that one.”
Doom was a critical and commercial failure, earning negative reviews from critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes and performing poorly at the box office. However, as Pike noted, neither her career nor Johnson’s suffered in the long term.
“It was probably after that that I decided to do my research [for acting roles],” Pike admitted. “I didn’t know enough about video games. I wasn’t the right kind of girl to be in that; I didn’t want to be the kind of sex symbol. So it’s okay, I guess, to fail at being an action star if to be an action star in those days was to be the kind of bombshell sex symbol. I just wasn’t that person.”
Rosamund Pike Speculates on Why ‘Doom’ Flopped Hard
As for why the film flopped so spectacularly, Pike had her own theory, worrying at the time it was in part “because I wasn’t hot enough.”
“If loads of guys say ‘That film is s—’ your part of it is obviously to play your character but also kind of look hot,” she speculated. “I don’t think I got that, or took that seriously, or kind of worked out for the gym body that a better female action star would have done.”
“Nobody helped me, nobody said — nowadays, I’m sure an actress cast in that would have a personal trainer, would have a sort of — there would be a conversation about, ‘You’re playing Lara Croft, this is how she should look,’ ” she added.
Nearly two decades after her not-so-successful turn as an action hero in Doom, host Elizabeth Day asked Pike if she’d ever give the genre another shot.
“No, but if I’m going to be one, I want to bloody succeed at it,” Pike shot back.