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
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 speedy, 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.’”
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