Los Angeles, Jan 4 Actor Dwayne Johnson had a pretty rough childhood. The actor and his family bounced around the country, from urban North Carolina to suburban Connecticut when he was an adolescent.
But there was one constant, the dysfunction. For the 26-year span of his acting career, Johnson compartmentalized the pain and instead focused on breezy tough-guy roles in such billion-dollar-plus juggernauts, reports ‘Variety’.
He told ‘Variety’, “My own mom and dad had an explosive and volcanic relationship. My dad was a pro wrestler at a time when it was the Wild West. There weren't million-dollar contracts. It was paycheck to paycheck and just trying to survive. And my dad struggled with his addictions and focused on his career and himself, while my mom was at home, raising me”.
He further mentioned, “She had to give up her own dreams and support the man that she loves. All she wanted was to be seen, and she was never seen. And I grew up watching that kind of decline in a relationship when a man battles his own demons. I watched their fights. I heard their fights, which is even worse”.
As per ‘Variety’, but in 2017, he felt the courage to plumb the past and began pursuing the life rights of MMA fighter Mark Kerr, whose drug addiction fettered his career as a two-time UFC heavyweight champ in the late ’90s.
He shared, “For years, I didn’t know that could actually serve as a landing place for me to be able to put all this trauma you go through into my work. I was probably scared to go there”.
The result is A24’s ‘The Smashing Machine’, a career pinnacle for Johnson, who sinks so thoroughly into a protagonist both bruising and bruised that he is unrecognizable.
Johnson, who parlayed his own professional wrestling stardom into movie A-lister, follows on the heels of several recent actresses long been defined by their bodies rather than their bodies of work who delivered revelatory performances including Demi Moore and Pamela Anderson.
For actors, that opportunity and feat is even rarer. But when Johnson first approached Benny Safdie in 2019 with the idea of bringing Kerr’s story to the big screen, the director recognized Johnson’s potential.
Johnson met with both brothers but says ‘Smashing Machine’ was always developed as a solo effort by Benny.
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