Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is well-known for his pro wrestling career, as well as being the smoldering star of some of the best action movies, but his upcoming A24 release is a whole other sort of beast that nearly wasn't made. Before The Smashing Machine finally punched through delays and doubt, director Benny Safdie tried a very old-school move to keep the dream alive by mailing the former WWE star a piece of Mark Kerr history. But sadly, the package never arrived.
While promoting their 2025 movie schedule release, the pair spoke with Entertainment Weekly in a joint interview, reealing Safdie had tracked down a vintage ’90s yellow Nautica sweater Kerr actually wore—miraculously in Johnson’s size—and mailed it with a handwritten note about their long-gestating biopic. The Black Adam star’s reaction was equal parts bemused and crushed:
I never got it! Someone's going to find the note someday, somewhere, being auctioned off. He sent it with this beautiful note about, 'I don't know what's going to happen with this project, but I wish you well with this, and I hope it's me [who directs it], but here, take this [sweater].' And I never got it. But that is one of the many, many things that makes this entire journey so kismet and had to happen, because this film changed our lives.
Safdie laughed in agreement with the Jumanji star. The director then added:
Everything happens for a reason. When we finally sat down and said, 'Let's do this thing,' we both were in the perfect place to really understand Mark better. We made the movie when it had to be made and how it had to be made.
It’s heartening to see both the actor and the filmmaker stay upbeat about the lost piece of history. After years in the making, the movie is finally here. Maybe everything really does happen for a reason, or it's a "large dose of copium."
The misrouted sweater really captures the movie’s themes of perseverance, finding the right moment, and trying again until it finally works. A few years back, Johnson reached out to Safdie after watching HBO’s 2002 documentary about Kerr. He couldn't shake off the fighter's contradictions: he was a force in the ring, but outside of it, he was soft-spoken and searching for something more. Safdie wanted to dig deeper into the stuff the documentary skipped over—those behind-the-scenes moments of relationships, relapses, and personal struggles that you wouldn’t catch on camera.
That’s the movie audiences are about to get. The Smashing Machine traces Kerr’s late-’90s peak and the brutal aftershocks of painkiller addiction, the push-pull love story with Dawn Staples (played by Emily Blunt), and the cost of being “the most dominant” in the ring until you’re not. Safdie says he, Johnson, and Blunt became close with Kerr and Dawn to honor the emotional truth rather than a strict transcript. Kerr and his family saw an early cut, and according to the filmmakers, their reaction mattered most.
Dwayne Johnson’s physical transformation has been a headline in itself, with intense makeup that leaves The Rock nearly unrecognizable. I was on the fence about The Smashing Machine at first, but the cast and crew’s new comments, the bittersweet story of the lost shirt, and the early reviews have me fully on board for the A24 drama arriving October 3
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