Doom! Doom! We’re All Doomed!

The last major piece of casting for Fox's mega-budget Fantastic Four movie was announced today - and now we know who will be playing the FF's arch-nemesis, Dr. Doom. And it's a little out of leftfield. At Comic-Con recently, FF director Tim Story confirmed that the actor who would be cast as Doom - a horribly disfigured scientific genius, encased in a metal bodysuit who engages in a war of wits and weapons with the FF's brainbox leader, Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd) would have a "wild accent". Well, Australian clearly qualifies as 'wild' in Hollywoodland because Julian McMahon - and not the rumoured Jason Isaacs, Stellan Skarsgaard or Tim Robbins - has been cast as Victor Von Doom. It's a surprising piece of casting, but one that could well work. McMahon may be best known over here as the ex-husband of Danni Minogue (so he's certainly had experience grappling with enhanced human beings), but he's got the smarmy villain thing downpat as sneering plastic surgeon Christian Troy in the cracking TV show, Nip/Tuck. McMahon will spend most of the movie under not only a layer of heavy armour (with rumours persisting that Doom will actually have his metal bodysuit fused to his skin. Ouch) and even heavier prosthetics, but he should thank his lucky stars that he's not Michael Chiklis who plays The Thing. He'll have to undergo full body prosthetics to play the ever-lovin' blue-eyed rock-skinned muscleman. The plot of FF is still under wraps, but Chiklis did reveal at Comic-Con that there would be one full-on, crunching, scenery-wrecking battle between The Thing and Dr. Doom, on a New York subway. FF, which also stars Jessica Alba and Chris Evans (no, not that one) starts filming in a couple of weeks in Vancouver.