There’s not a whole lot which went right with 2015’s Fantastic Four. Nearly every conceivable aspect which could go wrong in filmmaking, went completely wrong in Josh Trank’s film and star Toby Kebbell knows it.
While the director himself has disowned it mostly, the damage is still being felt by nearly everyone who was involved. Its stars have all had to fight their way back into serious actor status, with potentially only Kebbell hobbling to return to recognition. Playing Doctor Doom in the 2015 film, Kebbell told comicbook.com he’d rather eat a “placenta puff” than return as Doctor Doom.
“Definitely the placenta puff. I’d eat a whole croque en bouche of placenta puffs rather than be asked if I would go back and be terrible as Doctor Doom again. ‘Hey, you were terrible as Doctor Doom. Would you go back and do it again?’ Eh, no.”
Kebbell also owned up to starring in a few other quite bad movies, saying it was never his goal to “ruin cinema”, but he “finally accomplished it” with a few of his roles. The self-deprecating humor of Kebbell is in good faith, but also shows the massive strain starring in, well, crap movies has on actors.
“Hey guys, I’m in Hurricane Heist, you don’t have to lie that I’m a good actor. I am in some of the worst movies of all time. I watched Pagemaster as a kid, and I was like, ‘This is a terrible movie,’ and I topped it. I didn’t realize I made it a goal of mine to ruin cinema, but I did it. I fully accomplished it.”
Weirdly, if you were to comb through Fantastic Four for positives, his version of Doom is probably the biggest highlight. The David Cronenberg-esque approach to the character made him feel threatening, even if the design of his costume was laughably bad. The corridor sequence in which he blows up several heads is genuinely horrific, and the original script had him as a secondary antagonist to Galactus.
Kebbell has starred in a plethora of strong films as well, with him giving great performances in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Joy Division biopic Control, and in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse.
Gun to your head, if you needed to bring back one member of the old cast, it might as well be Kebbell. Fantastic Four is currently available to stream on Disney Plus, if you enjoy torture.