Toby Kebbell On FANTASTIC FOUR's Failure: "The Fans Aren't Wrong"
It's been a few months since the colossal failure of Fantastic Four, and one of the movie's stars is speaking out about the fallout from one of the worst superhero movies in recent years. Toby Kebbell, who played the ill-fated villain Victor Von Doom (aka Doctor Doom), was cast in Warcraft before Fantastic Four became a box office bomb, and while at BlizzCon promoting Warcraft, he spoke with IGN about his reaction to the film's terrible reception:
“I was disappointed, but the fans aren’t wrong. The fans want what they want to see and if they don’t get satisfaction, they let you know. I appreciate that as a performer. My job is to come in and perform as best I can, and hopefully be directed in that path, and I felt like I was. I felt like the film was going to go well. It didn’t turn out that the fans felt that way, so their reaction is honest, I can only appreciate honesty.”
When asked whether he learned anything playing Doctor Doom that he'd be able to apply to his career moving forward, Kebbell was very candid with his response:
"I don't know if I learned anything from Doom apart from, perhaps, when I see something I don't agree with, to voice that immediately. I think that's important. As an actor, you're very conscious that your career is at stake with each job, especially on these larger productions. A film like that comes out, and I'm being sent maybe four scripts in a week and those scripts go to zero when it doesn't come out successful. So it actively affects my career. I think it's vitally important that if there's a problem on set, that it's voiced and we solve it there, and I think that collaboration's very important. Not to say that didn't happen on set, but the collaboration is vital. If we don't do that, then we suffer."
I can only speak for myself here, but I really feel for the guy here. It must have been tough to endure a troubled shoot and have a big movie fail on such a massive level, and that's not even considering having to deal with all of the behind-the-scenes stories that came out about the production. Kebbell was far from the worst thing about the movie — that'd be the half-formed and half-assed script — but it still has to sting seeing opportunities vanish right in front of your eyes just from being associated with a bomb of that magnitude. Hopefully he'll be able to bounce back in a big way soon.