Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson reflected on the opportunities he’s been given in Hollywood since becoming an actor during a press conference at the Venice Film Festival.
Johnson plays UFC champion Mark Kerr in Benny Safdie’s wrestling biopic The Smashing Machine, which premieres at the festival today and is due in theaters Oct. 3. The wrestler turned actor noted that the role is his most dramatic to date. He co-stars with Emily Blunt, who plays Kerr’s wife Dawn Staples.
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“I have, for a long time, wanted this,” Johnson said (via Variety), seated alongside Blunt and Safdie. “The three of us have talked for a very long time about, when you’re in Hollywood — as we all know, it had become about box office. And you chase the box office, and the box office can be very loud and it can become very resounding and it can push you into a category and into a corner. ‘This is your lane and this is what you do and this is what Hollywood wants you to do.’”
Johnson has starred in a slate of big-budget projects including Jumanji, Fast and Furious, Jungle Cruise, and Black Adam. He told reporters that “some were really good and did well, and some not so good.”
“I just had this burning desire and voice that was saying, ‘What if there is more and what if I can?’” he said. “A lot of times, it’s harder for us — or at least for me — to know what you’re capable of when you’ve been pigeonholed into something. Sometimes it takes people who you love and respect, like Emily and Benny, to say that you can.”
He continued, “I looked around a few years ago and I started to think, you know, am I living my dream or am I living other people’s dreams? You come to that recognition and I think you can either fall in line — ‘Well, it’s status quo, things are good, I don’t want to rock the boat’ — or go, ‘I want to live my dreams now and do what I wanna 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.’ I’ve been scared to go deep and intense and raw until now, until I had this opportunity.”
The Smashing Machine is Safdie’s solo directing debut. He previously collaborated with his brother Josh on films such as Uncut Gems and Good Time. Safdie wrote and directed the biopic, which also features real-life MMA stars Ryan Bader, Bas Ritten, and Oleksandr Usyk.
Kerr is a two-time UFC Heavyweight Tournament Champion whose momentous life was previously chronicled in the 2002 HBO documentary “The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr.” The roots of the feature film go back to 2019, when Johnson’s production company landed the rights to Kerr’s life story. He reached out to Safdie to helm the project, but the pandemic soon put the entire motion picture industry on indefinite hold. It didn’t get going again until Emily Blunt, who starred with Johnson in 2021’s Jungle Cruise, discussed it with Safdie when they worked together in 2023’s Oppenheimer.
The film is the first project of Johnson’s acting career that has stirred up talk of an possible Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
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‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
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