Dwayne Johnson recently told Vanity Fair that he had spent “three to four o’clock” in the make -up chair every morning during the shooting of “The Smashing Machine”, Benny Safdie’s sports drama that launches Johnson as a double UFC heavyweight champion Mike Kerr. It is a rare dramatic pivot for Johnson, who admitted that he felt an unprecedented level of nerves when he is in production.
“It was very real. I had not experienced this for very, very, very long, where I was really afraid and thinking:” I don’t know if I can do that. Can I do this? “” Said Johnson. “I realized that maybe these opportunities did not happen because I was too afraid to explore this thing … I was so hungry for an opportunity to do something raw and granule and open. And all of a sudden,” Smashing Machine “is coming.”
The film follows Kerr’s professional triumphs and personal difficulties, including his battles of toxicomania and his tumultuous relationship with his wife Dawn (Emily Blunt). Johnson and Blunt are close friends after playing in “Jungle Cruise” together, which helped Johnson to look into his vulnerable side to the camera.
“DJ has been a pigeonnier like the great hero who has all the answers and he will repair everything and he is invincible,” Blunt told Vanity Fair. “I think that until this moment, he may have thought it was the only way in which people wanted to see him.”
“I sat in front of this mirror for three to four hours and I watched everything. There were about 13 or 14 different prostheses. Subtle, but I think very impactful,” said Johnson about his transformation. “As I arrived, I was Mark Kerr and I felt him, the way he walked to the way he spoke and how he looked at life … If Emily and I were not the best friends, I don’t know that we could have gone to the places we were going.
Blunt called Johnson’s transformation a “effortless immersion” into Kerr, “as a complete, scary disappearance. From the first day, he was elsewhere. ”
“He absorbed and was testified to a large part of what Mark experienced that it was so beautiful to see this person drop to being an image, having to be the rock and crack in half for this role,” added Blunt.
Johnson concluded: “You must be ready to exploit everything you have experienced, and these are things that I had not explored on the camera or otherwise. I am not a large therapy, even if I am a defender of everything you need. I found it so scary, but also, so nourishing and for free. I opened it. “
“The Smashing Machine” is presented in global competition at the Venice Film Festival before opening up in theaters on October 3 of A24.
