Source: Entertainment Weekly

After years of starring in action movies, including the Fast and the Furious and Mummy franchises, Snitch, Pain & Gain, G.I. Joe, and San Andreas, and action-comedies The Other Guys, Central Intelligence, and the Jumanji franchise, Dwayne Johnson was yearning to show he could do more.

He got it.

In The Smashing Machine, he delivers a performance full of pain, heartbreak, passion, resilience, and tenacity as Mark Kerr, an MMA fighter who became a pioneer in the world of UFC. Behind the scenes, though, he was putting up a bigger fight with an addiction to painkillers, and his toxic relationship with girlfriend Dawn Staples — another standout, knockout performance by Emily Blunt — adds more weight to his inner turmoil.

But making sure audiences didn’t see the Rock, the WWE superstar alter ego who made Johnson a household name, on the big screen was top of mind for the actor and one of his big challenges.

“It was all-consuming because that was the goal: to completely disappear. And that was something that I had not been able to do in my entire career,” Johnson says on the latest episode of Entertainment Weekly’s The Awardist podcast, joined by Blunt. “As Emily likes to say, not been allowed to disappear. But also, I didn’t know if I could, and I was so hungry for that kind of challenge to disappear.”

It helped that his face would eventually be covered in 23 prosthetic pieces — three-and-a-half hours to apply “eyes, nose, cauliflower ear, scars,” he says, all the work of famed special effects makeup artist Kazu Hiro — and there was also the vocal and physical transformation (he gained over 30 pounds).

“To play these real people who are still alive today, who went through it, who were broken emotionally in many ways and who rose up out of the ashes, so to speak, but also this idea of what transforming really means…I’ve seen other actors do it. I saw Emily do it in Oppenheimer, and I wanted to do that,” he openly admits.

Blunt remembers the first time she saw her costar, who she first worked with on 2021’s Jungle Cruise, fully transform into Kerr for their first camera test.

“Everyone went very quiet, which I’m sure must have been very unnerving for DJ walking in. Everyone just stared. I almost cried because it was such an immersion, not just physically,” she recalls. “For me, what was more interesting and captivating was the energetic shift. I consider myself someone who knows DJ pretty well, and he was gone — like, completely gone. I felt this relief was over him. That really moved me, that he looked very peaceful as Mark. I’ve watched him for years be this colossal movie star, which is not for the faint of heart, and it’s actually not easy — you have to be born with that kind of charisma that he has, naturally and the ability to sort of pull audiences into his heart, even if it’s in a Fast and Furious. But it was just really amazing to see the relief to not have to be invincible or the Rock, any of those qualities which are not actually true to who we are as human beings. We are all sort of fragile in a way; none of us are Teflon. And I just got so excited and I still get goosebumps thinking about that day, ’cause I just knew there would be this journey ahead of not only a cathartic experience for all of us — ’cause we knew it was gonna be very exposing humanly, and you learn a lot about yourself and about the people that you’re working with — but I just knew he was gonna love it.”

Johnson’s journey toward getting the movie made started in 2019, and at one point approached Benny Safdie about directing. But then the pandemic happened, and once productions resumed, Johnson went to work on other projects. As luck would have it, Safdie and Blunt costarred in Oppenheimer; one day while filming that movie, he asked if she could reconnect him with Johnson because he couldn’t stop thinking about this story he told him about in 2019. That night, Blunt, now curious about this project the two guys were talking about, watched a documentary about Kerr and Staples.

“I didn’t wanna be pushy, but I would’ve been really pissed off if they hadn’t come to me for Dawn,” she says, laughing. “I watched the documentary, and I was riveted by this incredibly volcanic relationship. And I’d never played a relationship like that.”

Mark and Dawn’s arguments are frequent, as they insult and belittle each other — but then they make up just as quickly, repeating the cycle over and over. Their tumultuous relationship only further feeds Mark’s growing anxieties; she’s looking for solace from mounting tensions in her daily life. Blunt finds one scene in particular “emblematic of who they are and revealing,” when they visit the local fair after he returns home from rehab following an overdose. She can’t wait to ride the Gravitron, but he has no interest in the ride and being turned upside down — after all, he’s trying to keep himself centered and in control.

“Dawn was someone who was always chasing wildness, was part of the hazardous nature of that relationship, or that addiction to drama, to wildness, to freedom,” Blunt explains. “I think Mark was probably always trying to seek solace from madness, ’cause his life was always on the line, whether it was in the ring or down that rabbit hole of his own addiction. So that Gravitron ride for her is like that full flight of freedom, and you see her so joyful. It was an important moment for me, for the character who’s fairly tormented most of the movie, that she’s joyful and she’s alive, and she’s away from him. So it was quite an important moment that he is on the outside of being able to access that in her.”

For everything the scene meant, thought, it wasn’t a joyful one to film. Blunt, it turns out, is not one for rides.

“She was a trooper,” Johnson insists. “She rode that thing twice.”

Which might’ve been one too many times. “I got so sick,” Blunt admits. “I actually puked when I got home. It was awful.”

Fortunately, Safdie only made her do one take of another scene, a climactic moment late in the film when Dawn, following an explosive argument at home, locks herself in the bathroom. But not before getting a gun out of his nightstand. In the bathroom, she’s holding it to her head; Mark, unaware of what she’s doing but scared nonetheless, breaks down the door, gets control of the firearm, and in turn, wrestles Dawn to the ground.

“I just felt really scared about it. It’s such a dark place that you go to that it’s not even…I didn’t approach it like, ‘Oh, this will be something to sink my teeth into,'” she explains. “It’s not a joyous experience for me doing those scenes in any way. There’s nothing that I particularly relish about it. It’s just a really exposing, vulnerable place that everyone went to on set. It wasn’t just me; it was DJ and what he had to absorb from me in that moment, literally restraining me, and the things I was screaming at him were just horrifying.”

Safdie hadn’t originally planned on filming the bathroom scene on the day they did, but Blunt says they had momentum from filming the previous portion of the fight in the kitchen, so they kept going.

“I don’t remember very much from it, to be honest with you…. I do remember hearing him break the door down. I remember that. And I don’t remember much after it. And I knew where I had to go, and I knew what I had to yell,” she recalls. “Benny had said to us before we went — because he loves that spontaneous set where it’s found rather than planned, so nothing feels performative, it feels so real, which is also quite scary with a scene like that — so he said to DJ, ‘ If you can end up on the floor, that would be great.’ And he just left it at that. And I felt like my heart was pounding in my head before, it was so intense. Mm-hmm. And I remember hearing him come through the door, and then suddenly we were on the ground.”

It was in that moment she knew she was “being taken to the ground by a wrestler,” she says. “Adds And then we sat on the bathroom floor and we drank tequila for an hour and a half and had a therapy session, ’cause we couldn’t move.”

“We left parts of our soul on that floor,” Johnson adds.

Check out more from EW’s The Awardist, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year’s best in TV, movies, and more.

Listen to Johnson and Blunt’s full interview on The Awardist below, where Johnson opens up about how his father’s addiction and mother’s cancer diagnosis played into one of his most emotional scenes. The two also have some laughs as they share a hilarious memory from the first time they ever met, and they look back on their first day working together on Jungle Cruise and give an update on a potential sequel to that movie. Plus, Johnson reveals his pitch for being in The Devil Wears Prada 2, Blunt looks back on the call she got to join Steven Spielberg’s next movie, and more.

Elsewhere on the podcast, EW’s awards team shares thoughts on the renaming of the SAG Awards to the Actors Awards, as well as observations from the Governors Awards, where Tom Cruise, Dolly Parton, Debbie Allen, and Wynn Thomas all received Oscars, and more.

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