<\/p>\n
Ryan Bader has accomplished a lot in his fighting career, but these days he\u2019s receiving rave reviews for his performance playing UFC Hall of Famer Mark Coleman in the new film The Smashing Machine<\/em>. But it turns out he almost missed out on getting the opportunity to play the part after accidentally ignoring texts from the director.<\/p>\n Benny Safdie, who is best known for co-directing the Adam Sandler-led film Uncut Gems<\/em> as well as his appearance in the Oscar-winning movie Oppenheimer, reached out to Bader to gauge his interest in potentially playing a part in the MMA-themed movie.<\/p>\n \u201cI got a text from the director,\u201d Bader explained when speaking to MMA Fighting. \u201cHe didn\u2019t really say his full name, what he was doing and all that. He was just asking if we had time to have a little talk. I had no idea so I blew him off for like three weeks.<\/p>\n \u201c[We] finally got together and told me about the premise and the movie and did a little Zoom audition after that. Ended up getting the part and it was a lot of fun.\u201d<\/p>\n While he almost missed out on the opportunity at first, Bader was cast in the role as Coleman, who was a central part of the story focused around Mark Kerr as he attempted to get his career back on track after signing with Pride Fighting Championships.<\/p>\n The film, which is based upon the 2002 documentary of the same name, features both Coleman and Kerr as they prepare to compete in the historic PRIDE Grand Prix in 2000. Of course as a veteran MMA fighter, Bader was very familiar with Coleman but playing him in a movie was an entirely different kind of challenge to tackle.<\/p>\n \u201cI talked to him, and I got the producers to fly Coleman out for a day and a half to be on set and to watch it and he was kind of blown away,\u201d Bader said. \u201c[Mark] Kerr was on set. It was surreal. The fighting is in my wheelhouse, but we had to go through two weeks of stunt training to learn how to sell a punch and make it look like a real punch.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s cool is with the fights, we don\u2019t do the full fight, but the clips that we do when we show the fights, we rehearsed it to make it look like the real fight. We\u2019re doing everything that they did. So it was cool.\u201d<\/p>\n Bader was understandably nervous stepping on set for the first time because he shares so much time doing dialogue with Dwayne Johnson, who portrays Kerr in the film. Add in Academy Award-nominated actress Emily Blunt playing Kerr\u2019s girlfriend and Bader was jumping right into the deep end as an actor during the first day of production.<\/p>\n \u201cThis role is pretty big,\u201d Bader said. \u201cA lot of dialogue in that story with Coleman and the MMA, the fighting part comes pretty natural but just thrown in the deep end with two of the biggest movie stars on the planet with \u2018The Rock\u2019 and Emily Blunt.<\/p>\n \u201cI get nervous for anything but especially that first one. It was a pretty big scene, my first dialogue scene, and you\u2019re in a house with a bunch of people there, everybody\u2019s looking at you, you\u2019ve never done this before and it was like let\u2019s go. I did that and after that I felt pretty comfortable. It\u2019s just something new. I\u2019ve never been in that position. The fight scenes were great. We\u2019re in our fight shorts. We\u2019re in the ring, we choreographed it already. Those were in my wheelhouse, those were fun. But the weird different part, all right you\u2019re in a room and you have 9 or 10 lines and you go back and forth with \u2018The Rock.\u2019 It\u2019s pretty surreal. I felt like we all did really well, and I\u2019m excited about it for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n The fight scenes, while staged and choreographed, still had to look real, but Bader felt comfortable any time he was throwing or taking punches. It was the dialogue heavy moments when the former Bellator heavyweight champion felt a few butterflies fluttering around his stomach but Safdie got him through it.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re shooting those fight scenes, I mean we\u2019re there for seven hours getting after it,\u201d Bader said. \u201cIt was tough. I\u2019m not saying it was tougher than an MMA fight but a lot of work was put into it. Going into the dialogue scenes, I talked to Benny Safdie, the director, and I\u2019m like do I need to get an acting coach? He\u2019s like nope. He\u2019s like I\u2019m your acting coach, I want you how you are in your audition on Zoom, just show up ready.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was pretty crazy. Not my world and you just show up, and there\u2019s 80 people in a room, cameras, and it\u2019s like \u2018do you want to try one?\u2019 and you just get after it.\u201d<\/p>\n With The Smashing Machine<\/em> opening worldwide on Friday, Bader\u2019s performance has not only earned him a lot of attention, but he actually ended up signing with a talent agency that may eventually lead to him getting more roles in the future.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just honored I was able to get that part and represent a guy like Coleman,\u201d Bader said. \u201cI hope I did it justice.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ryan Bader has accomplished a lot in his fighting career, but these days he\u2019s receiving rave reviews for his performance playing UFC Hall of Famer Mark Coleman in the new film The Smashing Machine. But it turns out he almost missed out on getting the opportunity to play the part after accidentally ignoring texts from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2063105,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[326505,360077,344655,385024,384204],"class_list":["post-2063104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-benny-safdie","tag-mark-coleman","tag-mark-kerr","tag-mma-fighting","tag-ryan-bader"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Ryan-Bader-reveals-he-almost-missed-out-on-\u2018The-Smashing.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2063104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2063104"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2063104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2063106,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2063104\/revisions\/2063106"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2063105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2063104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2063104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2063104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}