I’ve been a fan of Dwayne Johnson since he was first going by The Rock in his WWE days, so I’m always looking forward to whatever new project the star is working on. His movies are like comfort food, because you always have a pretty good idea what you’re going to get when a new Dwayne Johnson movie comes out. At least, that was the case until The Smashing Machine.
One of the most interesting movies on the 2025 movie calendar has to be Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, a biopic about early UFC fighter Mark Kerr. Johnson will star as Kerr in a movie that has transformed him physically and will also be a radical departure for him as an actor in what will be a much more serious drama. Johnson tells Vanity Fair that the reason he’s doing a role like this for the first time now was a very real fear. He explained…
It was very real. I had not experienced that in a very, very, very long time, where I was really scared and thinking, I don’t know if I can do this. Can I do this? I realized that maybe these opportunities weren’t coming my way because I was too scared to explore this stuff.
It’s perhaps understandable why Dwayne Johnson would be too scared to explore some of the elements in The Smashing Machine. Mark Kerr dealt with substance abuse problems as well as a violent domestic situation. It’s about as far from the traditional action hero that we’re used to seeing him play on screen. It certainly may not appeal to the audience that makes The Rock's movies blockbuster hits.
Of course, The Smashing Machine might be exactly the movie that an audience would like to see from Dwayne Johnson. Emily Blunt, who co-stars in the film as Kerr’s girlfriend Dawn Staples, says Johnson may have believed himself that nobody wanted to see him take on such a serious role. She said…
DJ has been pigeonholed into the image of the big hero who’s got all the answers and he’s going to fix everything and he’s invincible. I think until this moment, maybe he thought that was the only lane that people wanted to see him in.
Dwayne Johnson is far from the only actor who has made a very successful career of playing very similar characters. As Blunt says, it often seems like once audiences find something they like, they only want to see that. While Johnson may not have known if this was something the audience wanted, it was something he wanted. He said…
I was so hungry for an opportunity to do something raw and gritty and rip myself open. And all of a sudden, Smashing Machine comes along.
Johnson was the one who contacted the Safdie Brothers about the idea of making The Smashing Machine, a film based on the documentary of the same name about Kerr’s life. Johnson had seen Uncut Gems and perhaps thought that the men who made audiences see Adam Sandler in a different way could do the same for him.
If nothing else, people are certainly curious to see how Dwayne Johnson does in this radical departure. The early buzz on The Smashing Machine and Johnson's performance are quite good. The rest of us will find out in October.
