Rosamund Pike Feared ‘Doom’ Movie Was Career-Ender

Gone Girl star Rosamund Pike says her 2005 action role killing zombies on Mars in the video game adaptation Doom, where she starred opposite Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, could have ended her acting 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,” Pike told the How to Fail With Elizabeth Day podcast. It wasn’t A Minecraft Movie or Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, evidently, especially after her initial co-star, Ray Winstone, dropped out.

“So suddenly I’m in this film with the Rock, and I realize how utterly ill-equipped I am to be an action star,” Pike recounted of meeting Johnson, as nice as he was buff, on their first day on set. “There were people pepping him up, there were weights on the set. Every time a gun was brought out, it was a holy relic for the Doom fans. There was a whole routine before takes… I was just out of my comfort zone, out of my league, out of my depth, and the film was an absolute bomb,” she added.

Pike even feared Doom would bring her Hollywood trajectory after a prized Bond girl role in 2002’s Die Another Day came to a screeching halt. “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. As I said, I don’t read the reviews, but you get the sense you’re lucky to have survived that one,” she insisted.

Doom didn’t doom Pike’s career, or for The Rock, as both went on to stellar careers. But the action movie turn did teach her to research future roles before agreeing to take them on. “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. In those days that was to be the kind of bombshell sex symbol. I just wasn’t that person,” Pike said.

Of course, Pike wasn’t so accepting of lacking that action star physique at the time. “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. It’s not the total failure of the film. But if loads of guys say that film is shit, your part in it is obviously play your character, but also kind of look hot. And I don’t think I got that, or took that seriously, or worked out for the gym body that a better female action star would have done,” Pike told the podcast.