by Gill Pringle in LA
Six years ago, Emily Blunt began an unlikely friendship with Dwayne Johnson while making Disney’s Jungle Cruise.
“We just became very fast friends, like an immediate secret language, which I think you feel with certain people that you work with,” says the British actress.
Such was their chemistry and rapport, they vowed to work together again – a promise that they’ve made good on with The Smashing Machine, a gritty biopic about pioneering UFC fighter Mark Kerr.
Johnson utilises skills and body-building techniques from his own fighting history, under Benny Safdie’s direction, with the film laying bare the heights of Mark Kerr’s fame through to painkiller-addicted rock bottom and back again.
At the same time, it takes an unflinching look at his relationship with now-ex-wife Dawn Staples-Kerr, portrayed by Blunt.
High-pressure sports biography and high-octane emotional spectacle, there were plenty of tears along the way, not least when Kerr saw Johnson as him – both bursting into tears.
“The first time I ever saw DJ in prosthetics, was [on the set] in Vancouver, where it’s fight week up there, they brought me up to work with the stunt team to go over some stuff. And, at this point, I’ve had multiple conversations with him, over zoom and in person. And he’s just digging and looking for those emotional nuggets,” recalls Mark Kerr today.
“And I turn around in Vancouver, and he’s standing behind me, and nobody told me he was going to get prosthetics and my cauliflower ear and all this other stuff, and I just couldn’t stop cussing at him. I probably forearmed him, ‘Fuck you, dude. Seriously?’ I’m like, ‘Oh my god, you’re me’. And everything else, the layers of my speech pattern, my walk, my hand gestures.
“It literally sat me back. And when I watched the film for the first time, I was absolutely speechless, to the point where he and I cried so much afterward,” Kerr says.
Often cast as the muscle, or even comic relief, Johnson was itching to tackle something more meaningful, inspired by the 2002 documentary The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr.
“I think the attraction to do this is that, for so long, I have been a lucky guy to have had this really awesome career. I am grateful that I’ve been able to make some movies that people liked and some … they don’t … but I had been waiting for something like this and wanting to not only push myself, but then just really go for it and be hungry and rip it open. And this was what this represented,” says Johnson.
“And sometimes, we have that little voice behind our rib cage that we’ve got to listen to and our instinct. But it’s not always easy. I think, if you’re questioning yourself, it’s not always the easiest thing to know what you’re capable of. Sometimes it takes the people around you, who know you and love you, to say, ‘Hey, you can do this, and I believe in you, and let’s do it together.’
“And for me, one of those people was Emily and the other one was Benny. It all happened in the way that it was meant to happen at the time that it was meant to happen. But I also knew what this film represented,” he says.
Johnson and Kerr already had history. “I’ve known Mark for a long time. I met him in the late ‘90s when he was coming up as the greatest fighter on the planet, and I was running around wrestling, wearing a fanny pack,” he laughs.
For Blunt’s part, Johnson has always been full of contradictions, immediately warming to his surprising sweetness.
Like most of us, she had imagined him to be merely a tough guy when they first met on Jungle Cruise’s Hawaiian set. “But we just talked and shared our souls. And I was really taken by how different he was from what I had imagined,” recalls the Oscar-nominated actress.
If Jungle Cruise was all fun and thrills, then The Smashing Machine is the antithesis, with the couple engaging in full-scale fights, Dawn even contemplating suicide.
Giving kudos to Safdie’s sensitive direction, Blunt says, “I knew he would allow space to create a relationship that was full of complexity, and to play someone like Dawn, who is the full weather system. It’s really exciting for me and challenging.
“Mark and Dawn were both very open with me and DJ with the whole life of their relationship,” she says.
“I found it heart wrenching, because I think they both were really striving for a happy medium, and it was so elusive for a myriad of reasons. I’d never had the chance to put a relationship on screen that was very much not a movie relationship. It was really representative that someone can be your greatest love and a huge support system, and they can also be your undoing. They can be your tender spot, they can be all of those things,” she adds.
“It felt very true to life, and I was so thrilled to do it with my best buddy. Truly, my most enormous friend. And to watch him completely disappear and just this immersion was one of the more moving experiences of my career, of my life, like watching this happen was such a dream.”
The film’s most explosive fight scene is not necessarily the ones we see in the octagon before millions of fans, but instead the one that takes place at home behind closed doors.
“I think we knew that scene was approaching. And you knew it was going to be a beast, and I think it was one of the last things we shot in Vancouver. So, we’d had a run up to it, and everything that happens before that fight, loads the gun for that fight, literally. And I think we were nervous,” recalls Blunt, 42, who matches Johnson’s intensity at every step as their arguments escalate into the kinds of fights that can be heard two houses away.
“I get very scared before those scenes, because you know you’re going to have to kind of go elsewhere. It’s like a force field, partly because of the incredible environment that Benny creates, which blurs the line between reality and fiction,” she says.
The director – who enjoyed a small role as Edward Teller alongside Blunt on Oppenheimer – knew that the actress would be able to pull off playing one half of this fiery relationship. “I started thinking about asking Emily to play Dawn right after I met her, [when we were acting in Oppenheimer],” he says.
“I knew that she and Dwayne were friends. Then I saw footage of them together, not in movies, but just in life, and I could see that they really cared for one another and wanted each other to succeed. You could just feel that. I’d always known that Mark and Dawn have a complicated relationship in the movie. You need to have two actors who clearly had a foundation going in, so that when you bring the jackhammer in, and that foundation breaks and separates, it will be devastating,” says Safdie, who won Best Director at the recent Venice Film Festival for the film.
Now that Blunt and Johnson have reunited again, the couple plan to pull off a trifecta – co-starring with Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s 1970s crime thriller set in Hawaii, inspired by local mob boss Wilford “Nappy” Pulawa, who rose to power while trying to protect ancestral land.
The Smashing Machine is in cinemas 2 October 2025
