The day before the premiere of The Smashing Machine at the Venice Film Festival earlier this week, former mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr describes his emotional state as “vibrational.” It’s tough to pin down where jet lag ends and nerves begin, but not long before audiences will see Dwayne Johnson act out his life story for the first time, the 56-year-old is just trying to roll with the absurdity of the moment. Keeping a clear head has been at the top of his agenda for some time now: the first thing he told me, a week earlier over Zoom, was that he was “trying to try to wrap my head around what’s in front of me.” Entrusting your story to someone else and then putting it out there for public consumption is no small thing, even when you’ve lived out much of that story in the public eye to begin with.
Kerr’s particular story includes some epic highs and lows, as The Smashing Machine, out Oct. 3, depicts how a battle with painkiller addiction and a strained, volatile relationship pushed a fighting career on the cusp of historic achievement to its breaking point. And the man Kerr entrusted it to is writer-director Benny Safdie, best known for co-directing the 2019 crime thriller Uncut Gems with his brother Josh. In Venice, Safdie effuses about his subject’s generosity and vulnerability alike, and Johnson makes headlines for sobbing following the film’s premiere, as his own journey to tell Kerr’s story launches his transition from blockbuster action star to Serious Actor—the Oscar buzz began long before anyone had even seen the film.
As Safdie explained to Kerr as they began their journey together, “You lived your life so we can all feel it.”
Read more: Dwayne Johnson Captures the Complex Spirit of a Fighter in The Smashing Machine
A rocky rise to the top of a burgeoning sport
The Smashing Machine focuses on an intense period of Kerr’s life between 1997 and 2000, but his fighting career began in wrestling, first at his high school in…
