Though his role in the new A24 film “The Smashing Machine,” directed by Benny Safdie, strikes somewhat familiar territory, with the WWE superstar playing early UFC champion Mark Kerr, actor Dwayne Johnson revealed that taking the project on required the encouragement of his co-star Emily Blunt.
“There was this voice inside of me; the little voice said, ‘Well, what if? What if I could do more, and I want to do more, and what does that look like?’ And from the beginning, from the time we worked on ‘Jungle Cruise’ together, she really encouraged and believed in me, and said, ‘You know, there’s a place that you can put all this stuff that you have gone through as a kid . . . that place is what you love to do, which is acting. And you have me, let’s do this together,’” said Johnson during the film’s press conference at the 82nd Venice Film Festival.
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“I’m very close with Emily and shared a lot of everything that I’ve gone through,” he added. “And then Benny was on the other side of that saying, ‘Hey, I got you both,’ and ‘Let’s go for it.’ So that transformation could not have happened without my best friend being there to support, and encourage, and just say ‘You can do it.’”
When asked if he felt like playing Kerr in the sports biopic, which is already earning awards buzz, was due to him still having something to prove to Hollywood, Johnson clarified that it was more so about him proving something to himself. “[Hollywood] had become about box office, and you chase the box office. And the box office in our business that we know is very loud, and it can be very resounding, and it could push you into a category, and into a corner, and ‘This is your lane,’ and ‘This is what you do,’ and ‘This is what people want you to be,’ and ‘This is what Hollywood wants you to be,’ and I understood that, and I made those movies, and I liked them, and they were fun, and some [were] really good and did well, and some not so good,” he said. “A lot of times it’s harder for us to, or at least for me sometimes, to know what you’re capable of when you’ve been pigeonholed into something. It’s harder to know, ‘Can I do that? I feel like I can.’”
Johnson alludes to “Jungle Cruise” being a turning point that began to drift him away from the massive blockbusters that were expected of him. “Sometimes it takes people who you love and you respect, like Emily and Benny, to say you can,” he said. The actor spent the next year looking around and thinking “Am I living my dream, or am I living other people’s dreams? And you come to that recognition. And you could either fall in line — ’Well, it’s status quo. Things are good. I don’t want to rock the boat’ — or go ‘No, I want to live my dreams now, and do what I want to do, and tap into the stuff that I want to tap into, and have a place, finally, to put all this stuff that I’ve experienced in the past, that I’ve shied away from, been scared to go deep and intense and raw until now, until I had this opportunity to do this.’”
Director Safdie responded to his film’s star saying, “there’s strength in that vulnerability.” Reflecting on working with Johnson on “The Smashing Machine,” he said “I felt like I could ask you to do anything, and the subtlest things, and it would just get internalized and processed, and then it would come out, and then the two of you together, it just created this kinetic thing. I would always say it was like pulling these moments out of the air, you felt it. And it was just the best.”
