Collider‘s Matt Goldberg sat down with Toby Kebbell to talk about the Blu-ray/DVD release of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and naturally he asked the actor about his role as Doctor Doom in The Fantastic Four reboot. As Goldberg says, “this is where it gets really interesting:”
KEBBELL: He’s Victor Domashev, not Victor Von Doom in our story. And I’m sure I’ll be sent to jail for telling you that. The Doom in ours—I’m a programmer. Very anti-social programmer. And on blogging sites I’m “Doom”.
Yep. His name isn’t even Victor Von Doom, and I’m going to assume he’s also not the ruler of the fictional Eastern European country of Latveria like the character in the comics. However, the computer programmer aspect hints that they’ve kept Doom highly intelligent, and that’s how you represent powerful, scientifically-minded intelligence in the modern age.
Kebbell then gave a sense of how this character fits into the overall tone of the picture:KEBBELL: Yeah, it was cool man. Josh, the whole deal, the lo-fi way he did it, the ultra-real. It was just nice to do that. It was nice to be feeling like we had to come to terms with what was given by this incident.
Kebbell, it should be said, was BRILLIANT as Koba and is probably the best villain of any film this year. There’s no reason to believe that he won’t be able to do something similarly special with Doom, but the role is handicapped from the start with this bland modernizing. It’s still too early to say if it’ll be any more than that (bland), but I thought we were past this kind of stuff. There have been comic book movies for decades now, but the last 15 years have especially shown us how unnecessary this shit really is. People want to see Thanos on screen in all his purple, Infinity Gem-collecting glory. You don’t have to make Doom a redditor. We’ll follow you to Latvaria if you do it right.
If this is Josh Trank’s idea, then I’m really confused. It feels more like a studio note. Maybe he’s got a legitimately great take. Maybe…