Rosamund Pike admits action movie she made with Dwayne Johnson is “one of the worst films ever made”
Rosamund Pike has said the 2005 movie Doom, which she starred in alongside Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, is “one of the worst movies ever made”.
Pike made the admission in the latest episode of the podcast How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, as she looked back on the moments in her life and career when she fell short of the mark.
In this case, the failure was her attempt at being an action star. She began by noting the success of her role in the James Bond movie, Die Another Day, which made her believe that it could be a genre that suits her to the ground.
Pike elaborated, “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. 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.'”
Pike then explained how the film, which was based on a highly successful video game, was originally meant to star Ray Winstone as a “leader of a bunch of marines going out to this facility on Mars, and I was a scientist who was out there”.
However, Winstone didn’t end up starring in the film, and the role ended up going to The Rock, which made Pike realise that perhaps her forte isn’t in the realm of action movies, admitting, “So suddenly I’m in this film with The Rock, and I realise how utterly ill-equipped I am to be an action star.”
While she said Johnson “couldn’t be nicer”, Pike caveated it by highlighting the differences between them, noting, “He couldn’t be more of a different beast from 24-year-old RP (Rosamund Pike).”
Reflecting on her experience on set, Pike revealed that Johnson was surrounded by a “team of macho guys”, as well as weights and guns, which she likened to the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team. She confessed, “I was just out of my comfort zone, out of my league, out of my depth.”
On the finished product of the film, “It 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.”
Even though Pike doesn’t read reviews, she got the sense she was “lucky to survive that one”.
However, the film’s failure did teach Pike a vaulable lesson about being careful about the roles she accepted in the future, stating, “It was probably after that (when) I started to do my research, 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 absolute bombshell sex symbol. I just wasn’t that person.”
Pike also confessed that she placed the failure of the film partly on her shoulders, admitting, “As the girl, in a film like that, if the film is a bomb, you do think, ‘Shit, it’s because I wasn’t hot enough’.”
Never Miss A Scene
The Far Out Film Newsletter
All the latest film news from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.