Two decades as a box-office behemoth still left Dwayne Johnson with something to prove - which he does in The Smashing Machine. The film has changed his life, he tells Screen.
Since transitioning from professional wrestling to acting around the turn of the millennium, the man who levelled opponents under his ring name The Rock has become one of the undisputed box-office champions of his era. A stalwart of the action, fantasy and comedy genres, Dwayne Johnson has successfully balanced recurring roles in The Mummy, Jumanji and Fast & Furious franchises with standalone vehicles such as Hercules, Red Notice and San Andreas. His voice role as Maui in Disney’s animated Moana films was such a hit that he will be seen playing the demigod again in next year’s live-action remake.
If critical acclaim has largely eluded this cinematic titan, it has been more than compensated by his global popularity, lucrative businesses, and the movies and TV series he has been able to produce through his Seven Bucks production company. For all that, the 53-year-old star admits there was more he wanted to achieve. “I liked making the bigger movies that made a lot of people happy,” he tells Screen International. “But I had this little voice between my ears about wanting to do more, and wanting to challenge myself.”
While Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine eventually served that inner craving, it would be wrong to say Johnson’s career had been hitherto risk-free. Playing an action star with amnesia in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales — which received a rough ride when it premiered in Competition at Cannes in 2006 — was a departure, as was his appearance as an ex-convict with substance-abuse issues in 2013 crime film Pain & Gain. On the whole, though, indie scripts that crossed his desk would tend to be passed over in favour of four-quadrant fare.
“My whole ideology was built on the idea of putting the audience first,” he says. “If every once in a while a smaller film came my way, I wouldn’t be drawn to it emotionally. They were films that didn’t have happy endings, and there was something about that at that time I didn’t want to explore. I had a complete organ rejection of films like that, because I wanted to take care of the audience and send them home happy.”
It was around 2018 — a year that saw him partner with an outsized gorilla in Rampage and play a heroic amputee in Skyscraper — that Johnson began to re-evaluate his choices and priorities. It was also around this time he recalled watching 2002 documentary The Smashing Machine: The Life And Times Of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr, about a professional wrestler going through his own transition into the world of mixed martial arts (MMA). “I remember watching the documentary and thinking, ‘I’d love to make this a movie,’” he explains. “However, as an actor, I don’t know if I’m ready.”
Later, more certain that he could finally do Kerr’s story justice, Johnson got in contact and found him open to the idea of having his life depicted on screen. “I’d not known Mark well, but I had met him. We were kind of in the same circles, at the same venues and gyms. I was familiar with the legend of Mark Kerr, but I didn’t know he had spiralled so badly with his addictions and his overdoses. I unfortunately had a lot of friends who were addicted to painkillers at that time, and I sadly lost a lot of them.”
A drama about Kerr’s move into MMA, his involvement in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and his dependence on opioids was beginning to take shape, with sibling filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie potentially at the helm. “I reached out to those guys, and we had a great meeting,” says Johnson of the duo behind 2017’s Good Time and 2019’s Uncut Gems. “But then Covid hit, things went sideways and the project went away.”
It was Emily Blunt, Johnson’s co-star in 2021’s Jungle Cruise, who proved instrumental to the project’s rehabilitation, not only through reconnecting Johnson with the younger Safdie brother but also by expressing an interest in playing Kerr’s partner Dawn Staples.
“I knew Emily was doing Oppenheimer with Benny and I sent her the documentary. She saw it and said, ‘It feels like you were born to play this role.’”
The fact that California native Johnson and London-born Blunt had experience of working together made the scenes depicting Mark and Dawn’s volatile relationship easier to film. “We had a friendship, a bond and a trust, and that allowed for vulnerability,” he reflects. “But also, it hurt, because when it’s someone you care about, you don’t want them to feel pain.”
Safdie, for his part, had his own thoughts on how to make The Smashing Machine feel raw and authentic, which included keeping the camera outside of the ring during the bruising fight scenes. According to Johnson, the director was also keen the actor should undergo a significant physical transformation. “Four months before we started rolling, he said, ‘You’re going to have to get bigger,’” he remembers. “Mark was much bigger than I ever was, and he had a different quality of muscle.”
Under the skin
Kazu Hiro, the Oscar-winning makeup artist behind Gary Oldman and Charlize Theron’s metamorphoses in Darkest Hour and Bombshell, was brought in to facilitate Johnson’s facial modifications. “It was four hours every day in the make-up chair with 23 prosthetics,” he reveals. “I was told my entire career, ‘You can never disappear, you look how you look,’ but I now understand what it means to be in somebody else’s skin.”
The Smashing Machine’s Venice premiere in September was a night to remember for all concerned, with a protracted standing ovation that had Johnson in floods of tears. “I couldn’t hold back my emotions and I couldn’t stop crying,” he admits freely. “I’ve been lucky to have done some really cool stuff, but I’ve never experienced anything like it.”
While the film’s October release saw takings stall at a disappointing $21m worldwide at press time, there will still be reason for distributor A24 to celebrate should Johnson feature among this awards season’s leading actor hopefuls. “It’s a funny thing when you have clear intention and make a declaration to yourself and the universe,” muses a man whose upcoming projects include a Hawaii-set mob saga with Martin Scorsese and psychological thriller Breakthrough with Darren Aronofsky. “I’m at a point in my life where I’m giving my full self, as an actor and an artist.”
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