As both a WWE Superstar and a Hollywood actor, Dwayne Johnson has seen his fair share of battles, but going toe-to-toe with Emily Blunt on the set of The Smashing Machine may have been his most difficult.
Scheduled to hit theaters on October 3, the film will see Johnson step into the shoes of former UFC and PRIDE fighting legend Mark Kerr. The biopic will primarily focus on Kerr’s time competing in Japan following his success inside the Octagon and the following struggles he endured each out and in of the ring.
Beforehand, ‘The Rock’ detailed some of the grueling fight sequences within the movie, together with an incident the place considered one of his on-screen opponents left him seeing stars from an all-too-real punch.
Nevertheless, that seemingly paled compared to the ache he felt whereas filming the home battles between Kerr and his associate, Daybreak Staples.
“Emily is among the best actors of our time and of all-time, interval,” Johnson stated at a current media scrum alongside Kerr and director Benny Safdie. “She acts 10 toes tall when she desires to and rooted from the bottom up in her performing. These scenes damage my coronary heart they usually damage Benny’s coronary heart and Emily’s they usually damage Mark’s coronary heart they usually’re exhausting to observe.
“As Benny has stated, I’ve heard him say so superbly, once you love someone a lot and so exhausting as Mark and Daybreak did, as {couples} on the market do, typically it’s those you like most that you may have essentially the most uncooked, meanest of fights with.”
Blunt and Johnson aren’t any strangers to at least one one other. The 2 co-starred collectively in Disney’s attraction-based blockbuster Jungle Cruise in 2021. A few years later, Blunt would go on to captivate audiences in Oppenheimer, incomes herself an Oscar nomination.
Dwayne Johnson Recollects Mark Kerr’s response to seeing The Smashing Machine
Regardless of the challenges confronted by Johnson and Blunt throughout these scenes, witnessing them unfold on display had an much more profound affect on Kerr, the person who skilled them firsthand. Johnson remembers the robust response Kerr exhibited when the 2 have been current at a movie pageant screening in Venice.
“After we have been on the Venice Movie Pageant, this was the primary time that I had sat subsequent to Mark watching the movie earlier than,” Johnson stated. “He’d seen it a few instances on his personal and he and I have been collectively like this and he’s an enormous boy and I really feel his physique, this entire time watching this, and each time these fights would occur with Mark and Daybreak his physique would start to shake.
“I regarded over at one level in the direction of the tip, the large battle scene, and Benny’s holding his hand, and he held his hand, he simply stored it there for the remainder of the film.”
