In the months, weeks, and days leading up to the start of production on The Smashing Machine, Dwayne Johnson contended with an unfamiliar feeling: He was nervous. “It was very real. I had not experienced that in a very, very, very long time, where I was really scared and thinking, ‘I don’t know if I can do this. Can I do this?’” he says. “I realized that maybe these opportunities weren’t coming my way because I was too scared to explore this stuff.”
The wrestling icon turned movie star has been a fixture of American pop culture for decades, toplining everything from the billion-dollar-grossing Jumanji franchise to Netflix’s most watched film ever, Red Notice. But Johnson’s screen persona has tended to stay in a particular lane that leaves little room for truly vulnerable work, the kind that’s mined from an actor’s deepest, sometimes ugliest depths. “DJ has been pigeonholed into the image of the big hero who’s got all the answers and he’s going to fix everything and he’s invincible,” says Emily Blunt, Johnson’s Smashing Machine costar. “I think until this moment, maybe he thought that was the only lane that people wanted to see him in.”
Speaking with me later, Johnson concurs: “I was so hungry for an opportunity to do something raw and gritty and rip myself open. And all of a sudden, Smashing Machine comes along.”
In reality, however, this project didn’t come together overnight. Johnson first saw the HBO documentary The Smashing Machine, centered on the MMA champion Mark Kerr and exploring his painkiller addiction, around its 2002 release. He got to know the man a bit as their careers overlapped between their respective fighting fields. “I lost a lot of my friends to addiction and to suicide—in the late ‘90s, early to mid 2000s, there were a lot of untimely, very early deaths,” Johnson says. He connected to Kerr’s hard-earned story of coming out the other side; he related to his personality contradictions, as a gentle giant known for his brutality in the ring. He thought about playing him one day.
When Johnson saw Uncut Gems, the 2019 sensation helmed by Benny and Josh Safdie, he got in touch with the brothers about collaborating on a movie about Kerr. Then the pandemic broke out, and like many ideas developing during that period, their Smashing Machine began floating away.
But Johnson never stopped thinking about it, nor did Benny Safdie. “Dwayne felt so deeply about it, it was something I couldn’t shake,” the director says. After Uncut Gems, the Safdie brothers went their separate professional ways, with Josh helming the Adam Sandler Netflix special Love You while Benny acted in projects like Oppenheimer and The Curse (which both Safdies also produced). Still, he didn’t initially know what he wanted to direct on his own. “I was like, ‘What do I want to do?’” Benny tells me. “It was literally like, ‘What about the thing you haven’t stopped thinking about for four years? Oh, that’s it!’” He also spotted a potential way back in: He was spending his days on the Oppenheimer set with one of Johnson’s best friends, Emily Blunt.
Fast-forward a few months, and Blunt connected Johnson with Benny Safdie before being cast herself as Mark’s no-BS girlfriend, Dawn Staples. Things started lining up fast, and Johnson was faced with the enormity of what the job would entail. “We came up with this analogy of, like, we’re standing on the shoreline, we’re looking at these waves that seem so insurmountable,” Johnson says. “I remember Emily saying, ‘You just have to dive in, and we’re going to dive into this thing together.’”
Benny Safdie has always wanted to make a “quote-unquote ‘fight’ movie,” citing the Rocky films and The Harder They Fall as major inspirations. The genre’s long cinematic legacy looms all over The Smashing Machine, shot with prowling documentary-style camerawork (The Curse’s Maceo Bishop serves as DP) and peppered with surprising needle drops.
Yet Safdie also imbues the film with a cozy earnestness, modeled on Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. He would send Johnson clips of James Stewart’s George Bailey absorbing terrible news in one frame before shifting to a warm smile for the next. “I’m like, ‘That’s Mark,’” Safdie says. “The way he speaks is so magical. He’s got this childlike sense of wonder. You can’t believe that it’s the same brain that’s doing all that.” Indeed, this is a two-time UFC Heavyweight Tournament champ we’re talking about. Kerr was given the Smashing Machine nickname for a reason.
The Smashing Machine uses its subject’s idiosyncrasies to buck convention all the way through. This is no triumphant sports movie. We meet Mark at the peak of his athleticism, witnessing his dominance in the ring, but for the most part Safdie tells a story of agonizing personal struggle, both physically as it relates to Mark’s substance abuse and personally as his relationship with Dawn turns unsustainably, dangerously volatile. “This guy appeared to be so strong and yet was dealing with so much physical and mental stuff,” Safdie says. “How do you empathize with somebody who looks like they’re invincible? That was the goal for me.”
“What a walking contradiction in the most beautiful way Mark was and still is,” Johnson adds. “Soft-spoken, sweet, kind—yet at one time the most lethal man on the planet.”
In addition to the transformative performance of his lead actor, Safdie leaned on guerrilla cinematography. The movie visually obeys the laws of reality, which is to say, there’s little coverage trickery to ensure multiple angles of a given scene are captured. Each sequence is meant to feel as if it only happened once, bringing the audience directly into Mark’s mind and everything he’s feeling.
Safdie never even took the camera inside the ring. “I wanted it to feel like you were at the fight, ringside. I put all these rules on myself—I said, ‘It’s like our camera crew has third-tier press passes. We can’t get the primo spots, we have to be behind everybody and fight our way through,’” Safdie says. “When you are distanced and you have that voyeur point of view, it can be hard to access the person. But I learned on The Curse that you can do both. You can have it be far away, but also be directly in their heads at the same time.”
This remained true for The Smashing Machine’s most explosive fights—which happened to hit far closer to home. From the beginning, Mark and Dawn get into it, and their arguments turn vicious. Their loud, violent final clash takes place in the characters’ home, on a set built from scratch so that Safdie could hide the cameras—a disturbing private moment captured in secret. “You didn’t see a camera—you didn’t see a light, a setup, nothing,” Johnson says.
“It was like High Noon in the kitchen a lot of the time, and that was incredibly transporting and rattling, because you don’t have the technicalities around you that help you flash in and out of this pain of what you are portraying,” Blunt adds. “We would be shaken. The movie was sponsored by tequila, just for us to come down from some of those scenes. They were bonkers to try to come back to Earth from.”
When Johnson watched The Smashing Machine documentary, he felt that “it painted Dawn in a light that perhaps was a little unfair.” He aligned with his colleagues in the mission to make Mark’s great love a full-fledged character for their movie, not just the chaos agent waiting at home. This intention was also communicated directly to both Mark and Dawn, whom Safdie, Johnson, and Blunt stayed in close contact with from before the movie was shot to just recently, when The Smashing Machine’s subjects sat for an early screening.
“However eruptive that relationship was, it was centered in this huge need for each other—a codependency,” Blunt says. “It’s an all-consuming existence to be a fighter and you need everybody in your life to get in line with that. I just don’t think Dawn was the kind of person just to get in line.” The trick for the Oscar nominee was to honor that disarray while still doing right by a woman she’d become quite fond of: “I’ve actually never played somebody who is still with us. I’m very grateful to her…. I just needed to be her advocate.”
Blunt and Johnson, who starred together in Jungle Cruise, also brought their own loving dynamic to the movie. For Johnson, this was crucial. He’d start every day by, essentially, disappearing. “I just sat in front of that mirror for three to four hours and watched it all change. There were about 13 or 14 different prosthetics. Subtle, yet I think very impactful,” he says. “By the time I got to set, I was Mark Kerr and I felt it, from how he walked to how he talked and how he looked at life.” Then came that heavy material to play opposite Blunt: “If Emily and I weren’t best friends, I don’t know that we could’ve gone to the places we went to. That closeness created the trust, which then allowed for the vulnerability, which then allowed for us to go anywhere.”
“It seemed to be an effortless immersion—like a full disappearance, spooky. From day one, he was elsewhere,” Blunt says of Johnson. “He has absorbed and borne witness to so much of what Mark has experienced that it was such a beautiful thing to watch this person let go of having to be an image, of having to be The Rock, and crack himself in half for this role.” Safdie shares a similar sentiment: “He was acting with every fiber of his body. It was unreal.”
What’s most striking about Johnson’s performance is not the dramatic change in his appearance, nor the impressive physicality showcased both in and out of the ring. The actor conveys a depth of inner torment, a kind of swirling sadness, that feels like true uncharted territory—a tender reframing of his imposing star power. “You have to be willing to tap into all the stuff that you’ve gone through, and this was stuff that I had not explored on camera or otherwise,” Johnson says. “I’m not a big therapy person, even though I’m an advocate for whatever it is you need. I found it so scary, but also, so nourishing and freeing. I ripped it open.”
The Smashing Machine will premiere over Labor Day Weekend at the Venice Film Festival. It’s a significant milestone for Benny Safdie, making his solo feature-film directing debut here. A few months later, Josh Safdie’s own solo effort, Marty Supreme, will hit theaters via Smashing Machine’s same distributor, A24.
When I ask Benny about this timing, he says simply, “It’s exciting.” Then he shares a story. While Benny was on a break from editing his film, he took a walk on the Upper West Side with his camera, taking random photos. A man stopped him and told him to go down to Orchard Street and observe what was going on there—they’d made the whole area look like 1950s New York. The man didn’t know it, but he was describing the shoot for Marty Supreme.
Safdie chuckles at the memory. “I knew what he was talking about. I’m like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s really cool, I should go check it out,’ and then that was it,” Safdie says. “It was just fun to know that we were both doing something at the same time at separate moments. It was the perfect embodiment of that feeling.”
As for Johnson, he’ll likely find himself in the awards conversation for the first time in his career. Regardless of what happens there, though, Johnson speaks like a very different actor now: “After all these years I’ve been making movies, it became so glaring to me. It’s almost like a…” He trails off, trying to find the right words. “There’s a song from George Strait called ‘Where Have I Been All My Life?’ This reminded me of that. Where have I been?” Johnson says. “The thing I was fearing is the thing that actually gives me the greatest peace—a safe place to explore all this stuff that I’ve experienced over the years. I have a place to put it.”
The Smashing Machine will premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 1 before it’s released in US theaters on October 3. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall film festival coverage, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names set to hit Venice, Telluride, and Toronto.
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