In the months, the weeks and days preceding the start of the production The breaking machine, Dwayne Johnson Contained with an unknown feeling: it was nervous. “It was very real. I hadn’t experienced this for very, very, very long, where I was really afraid and I thought, I don’t know if I can do that. Can I do this? ” he said. “I realized that these opportunities may not be happening because I was too afraid to explore these kinds of things.”
The wrestling icon that has become the movie star is an Incontour Jumanji franchise with the most watched film in Netflix, never, Red opinion. But Johnson’s screen character tended to stay in a particular path that leaves little room for truly vulnerable work, the genre that is extracted from the deepest depths, sometimes the ugliest of an actor. “DJ was a pigeonnier like the great hero who has all the answers and he will repair everything and he is invincible,” said Emily Blunt, Johnson SMASHING Machine Costar. “I think that until this moment, he may have thought it was the only way in which people wanted to see him.”
Speaking with me later, Johnson agrees: “I was so hungry for an opportunity to do something raw and granule and to open up. And all of a sudden, SMASHING Machine come. “”
In reality, however, this project did not meet overnight. Johnson saw the HBO documentary for the first time The breaking machine, Centered on the MMA champion Mark Kerr And to explore his analgesic dependence, a few years after his release in 2002. He got to know the man a little while their careers overlapped between their respective fighting grounds. “I lost many of my friends because of dependence and suicide – in the late 90s, in the early 2000s, there were a lot of premature and very early death,” said Johnson. He connected to the hard -won history of Kerr to go out on the other side; He was linked to his personality contradictions, as a sweet giant known for his brutality in the ring. He thought of playing it one day.
When Johnson saw Not cut gems, The 2019 sensation led by Benny And Josh Safdie, He contacted Benny to collaborate on a film on Kerr. Then the pandemic broke out, and as many ideas developing during this period, their SMASHING Machine started to float.
But Johnson has never stopped thinking about it, nor Benny Safdie. “Dwayne felt so deeply, it was something that I couldn’t shake,” said the director. After Uncoupled gemsThe Safdie brothers went their separate professional ways, with Josh who directed the Adam Sandler Netflix Special I love you While Benny acted in projects like Oppenheimer And The curse (that the two SAFDIES also produced). However, he did not initially know what he wanted to direct by himself. “I said to myself, what do I want to do?” Benny tells me. “It was literally like,” and the thing you have not stopped thinking for four years? ” Oppenheimer Located with one of Johnson’s best friends, Emily Blunt.
Quick advance for a few months, and Blunt connected Johnson to Benny Safdie before being thrown as a Mark No-BS then friend friend, Staples of dawn. Things started to align quickly, and Johnson was faced with the enormity of what work would imply. “We have found this analogy, like, we hold on the shore, we look at these waves which seem so insurmountable,” says Johnson. “I remember [Emily] Say: “Just dive, and we’re going to dive [into] This thing together. ‘”
