The awful 2005 movie Rosamund Pike will never forgive herself for making: “I feel partly to blame”
Rosamund Pike made one of her best and worst films in the same year.
Although she had a fairly impressive screen debut in the James Bond sequel Die Another Day, giving perhaps the only good performance in the film, Pike had her truly breakout part in the 2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice.
The Jane Austen novel is one of the author’s most beloved, and while many previous films and shows attempted to translate the material, Joe Wright’s version took care to flesh out the relationships between the Bennet sisters, and Pike’s performance as Jane was a standout in particular. Unfortunately, 2005 was also the year that she appeared in Doom, an adaptation of the popular video game franchise, and despite the fact that nearly every such film had been a bust up until that point in time, Hollywood was convinced that there was untapped potential.
The film also starred Dwayne Johnson, who was still trying to establish himself as a movie star distinct from ‘The Rock’ on WWE. It was such a disaster that Johnson had to take a different approach to his career, and started doing more family-friendly comedies before being lured back into action when he was cast as Luke Hobbs in Fast Five.
It’s hard to blame Pike for her performance, as not even a young Meryl Streep or Diane Keaton could have made the terrible dialogue in Doom sound appealing. However, she seemed to truly show remorse for her involvement in what became a massive disappointment for fans of the game.
“I feel partly to blame in that respect because I think I failed just through ignorance and innocence to understand, to fully get a picture of what Doom meant to fans at that point,” Pike said, “I wasn’t a gamer. I didn’t understand. If I knew what I knew now, I would have dived right into all of that and got fully immersed in it like I do now, and I just didn’t understand.”
In fairness to her, studios weren’t exactly treating video game adaptations as highly coveted properties at this point, and barely even remained faithful to the source material. Although there isn’t much she could have done in what was a tough situation, Pike blamed herself for not understanding the importance Doom had in many people’s lives.
“I feel embarrassed, really, she admitted, “I feel embarrassed that I was sort of ignorant of what it meant, and I didn’t know how to go about finding out because the internet wasn’t the place it is now for the fans to speak up. I wouldn’t have known where to find them. I do now! In fact, I now have many friends who were massive fans of the game, and I just wish I had known them then.”
It can’t be said that Pike hasn’t put in the work when giving an immersive performance; she completely transformed herself to learn about the real Marie Colvin when she played her in A Private War, and did the same when she played Marie Curie in Radioactive. She has also shown that she can have a lot of fun when doing silly action movies like Now You See Me: Now You Don’t and Jack Reacher, so should there ever be a Doom reboot, she should be enlisted to be part of it.
