The day before the premiere of The Smashing Machine at the Venice Film Festival earlier this week, former mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr describes his emotional state as “vibrational.” It’s tough to pin down where jet lag ends and nerves begin, but not long before audiences will see Dwayne Johnson act out his life story for the first time, the 56-year-old is just trying to roll with the absurdity of the moment. Keeping a clear head has been at the top of his agenda for some time now: the first thing he told me, a week earlier over Zoom, was that he was “trying to try to wrap my head around what’s in front of me.” Entrusting your story to someone else and then putting it out there for public consumption is no small thing, even when you’ve lived out much of that story in the public eye to begin with. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Kerr’s particular story includes some epic highs and lows, as The Smashing Machine depicts how a battle with painkiller addiction and a strained, volatile relationship pushed a fighting career on the cusp of historic achievement to its breaking point. And the man Kerr entrusted it to is writer-director Benny Safdie, best known for co-directing the 2019 crime thriller Uncut Gems with his brother Josh. In Venice, Safdie effuses about his subject’s generosity and vulnerability alike, and Johnson makes headlines for sobbing following the film’s premiere, as his own journey to tell Kerr’s story launches his transition from blockbuster action star to Serious Actor—the Oscar buzz began long before anyone had even seen the film. As Safdie explained to Kerr as they began their journey together, “You lived your life so we can all feel it.”Read more: Dwayne Johnson Captures the Complex Spirit of a Fighter in The Smashing MachineA rocky rise to the top of a burgeoning sportThe Smashing Machine focuses on an intense period of Kerr’s life between 1997 and 2000, but his fighting career began in wrestling, first at his high school in Toledo, Ohio, then at Syracuse University. He graduated and moved to Arizona, training from 1992 to 1996 in the hopes of making the Olympic team. When he didn’t make the cut, Kerr needed a way to make money from his training—before the UFC, the only options were scrappy “barroom brawlers”.“When I first started, I had no clue what I was getting into. Then the UFC got a hold of me. I had this drive to be considered a professional, not a bar brawler, not like [being] the toughest kid scooped up off the playground.”In the early 1990s, MMA was burgeoning in popularity. The 1993 formation of the promotion company Ultimate Fighting Championship ensured that the few-rules, multi-style approach of MMA had an official American home. MMA was a combat sports disruptor—by combining different disciplines, you could no longer be the “best of the best” if you had spent your whole life training in just one of the martial arts. Instead, you needed to master countless styles and strategies to remain competitive. It was Kerr’s aggressive style and decisive victories that earned him the nickname the film borrows for its title.But in the late ‘90s, the sport faced an existential threat: After sustained political pressure over brutal matches, cable networks began refusing to air Ultimate Fighting Championship fights and states began to ban matches point blank. This massive reduction in potential income upset the trajectory of many emerging careers, including Kerr’s, so U.S.-based fighters like him migrated to international tournaments in Japan to compete in front of crowds who understood the technique and philosophy behind the sport.“It had gotten a bad reputation, undue. People just didn’t understand it. If you don’t understand something, you fear it, you label it. ‘Oh, it’s barbaric, it’s like cockfighting.’” Those were the words favored by Senator John McCain, a leader in the fight to ban the sport, though 10 years on, he changed his tune on MMA, citing new rules that made the sport less dangerous.Still, it was a time of exploration for fighters like Kerr. “We were trying to answer these fundamental questions like, ‘Can a smaller guy beat the bigger guy? Can a 10th degree black belt get beat by a wrestler? Can a wrestler get beat by a jiu jitsu guy?’” he explains.The sport’s value has only increased in the ensuing decades—in August, Paramount procured the exclusive UFC streaming rights for $7.7 billion. But Kerr’s career didn’t last long enough to benefit from that solid ground. By the time we see him competing in Japan’s illustrious Pride Fighting Championship in The Smashing Machine, he was addicted to the painkillers prescribed by his doctors to help him deal with the blows and bounce back more quickly for the next fight. In 1999, he survived an overdose. He officially retired in 2009, seven years after HBO aired a documentary that covered the same timeframe as Safdie’s film. Read more: The 46 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2025Struggles with addiction and an intense relationshipDuring this time, Kerr was using pain medication regularly, not knowing that it could result in a physical addiction that would threaten his life. His logic was simple: every fighter knows that they have a limited number of fights before they’re not able to compete anymore, and pain medication was the only way to maximize longevity and therefore income. His addiction was driven by a need to be available. “I don’t have time to sit on the sidelines for three weeks to heal. It became an easy solution for the moment, but a very complex solution long term.”Opioid addiction is distressingly common in nearly every contact and combat sport, but Kerr was isolated from the endemic abuse of painkillers in the industry. “I couldn’t get on the internet and search like I can today. There was a certain amount of, ‘Man, if I told somebody…’ It’s like this shame that I carried around, kept me quiet. So I just dealt with that. Whether it was prevalent or not, I know it was easy to access.”When The Smashing Machine isn’t situating audiences in the backstage corridors and makeshift infirmaries of Kerr’s matches, it takes us to Phoenix, Ariz., where Kerr and his girlfriend at the time, Dawn Staples, live what might have been a calm suburban existence if not for the walls of resentment erected between them. Staples, played in the movie by Emily Blunt, was a recovering alcoholic, and the couple’s fraught journeys with sobriety led to feelings of abandonment and bitterness. They separated after Kerr’s 1999 overdose and stint in rehab, only to reconcile months later. But one night, the police were called after an argument escalated to the point of Staples trying to hurt herself with razors, even grabbing Kerr’s handgun.“What I was doing at the time was incredibly selfish. Dawn just wanted my love. She wanted to feel important. The only thing important at the time was me fighting, then the second thing that came in importance was the drug and alcohol use. A lot of that volatility was because of my actions. I look back on it now, she’s a little girl asking to be loved, and I’m just a little boy that doesn’t know how to accept or give it.”Kerr’s career never recovered from his seismic and public defeat at Pride in May 2000, but he and Dawn quickly reconciled and married, staying together until 2006 and having a son together. Kerr fought occasionally afterwards, but always resulting in defeat. “So much of my identity is tied up in who I was as a fighter,” says Kerr. “I just didn’t know how to move on from it. It’s what held me in my addiction longer. It took me forever to realize it’s what I did, it’s not who I am.”After his last fight, Kerr realized he still had a lot to figure out. Sobriety was a huge part of that. “I’ve been sober for seven years now, and that took me a minute, because that’s a reckoning. I recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of body and mind. It took my son saying, ‘Dad, do you think you can stop drinking?’ I bounced around a couple different car dealerships trying to figure things out. It just wasn’t clear that I have, as an individual, so much more to offer than just this little tiny parcel of me that I was giving out to the world.”Read more: The 10 Best Movies Based on a True StoryBringing the story to HollywoodThe idea to bring Kerr’s story to the screen originated with Johnson, whose own wrestling career coincided with Kerr’s trajectory in the ring, and who saw this as a chance for a meatier role after years of tough-guy action parts. When Safdie first encountered glimpses of Kerr’s story through grainy digital images in that 2002 documentary, he related to it immediately. “As soon as I saw him, I was like, ‘I know what it feels like to be that guy.’ Maybe it’s because certain things have happened in my family [where] I’ve had to put my own feelings to the background for the benefit of somebody else,” says Safdie. While the documentary portrayed Kerr’s deep pain, Safdie felt his personality come through alongside it. “Mark was very comfortable in front of the camera, and I think that that allowed him to be vulnerable.”Kerr’s persona was markedly different in and out of the ring. Watching him speak at press conferences or make his case in private to Pride FC officials, both in the HBO documentary and as depicted by Johnson in The Smashing Machine, his desire to come across as a polite, thoughtful, and articulate representative of the sport shines through. By contrast, when Kerr competed, he experienced a kind of sensory overload. “There’s nothing else in my life that gives me that intensity. Even at the point where I can smell my opponent 30 feet from me. It’s this intensity of every single sense I have as a human being at its peak.”Cut to 2019, when Johnson’s agent Brad Slater contacted Kerr to acquire his life rights. Kerr felt out of his depth with anything to do with the entertainment industry—he didn’t know who owned his life rights, didn’t understand what it meant when the film was “greenlit,” and didn’t remember that he had met Slater 25 years earlier in a Los Angeles Cheesecake Factory. Johnson announced the project that fall during a UFC event at Madison Square Garden, and while the actor had briefly spoken with Kerr about how it would play out, Kerr describes their initial conversation as “almost transactional.”When the pandemic hit, The Smashing Machine took an extended pause, and Kerr tried to stop paying attention to the film’s prospects: “I gave it to the universe. I had Dwayne’s cell phone number for four years. I didn’t call or text once.” Four years later, just before A24 announced the film with Safdie attached as director, Johnson called Kerr, and the tone of the conversation was completely different. “It wasn’t transactional, it was heartfelt, like, ‘I’m ready to do this. I’m ready to take on something that’s completely different from what I’ve ever done.’ The amounts of sincerity and compassion were completely different than when we had spoken a few years earlier.”This wasn’t the first time Johnson had picked Kerr’s brain. Johnson began his pro-wrestling career around the same time as Kerr started in MMA, and in the late ‘90s, both men trained at Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach. “It was before he had the Rock persona nailed down. He said he was on the road 300 days out of the year, and [with] what he was making, he had to pay to be on the road at the end of the day.“We had lunch at a place in Venice called The Firehouse. He was asking me, like ‘Hey, the Japanese, did they treat you good? Did they pay?’” He was asking all these questions, but I didn’t understand at the time that he was interviewing me to see if there was a possibility that he could go to Japan and fight.”Making sure the film got it rightBefore the cameras started rolling, Kerr acted as an informal consultant on Safdie’s script. “There are certain parts where he wanted clarity,” Kerr says of Safdie. “Not clarity of what happened, but emotional clarity.”“I would ask him if this felt truthful. He would say yes, or he would say no, and I would say, ‘Well, why not?’” says Safdie, who stresses that he didn’t want Kerr to feel “used and abused by this process.” In one of their earliest conversations, Safdie told Kerr his entire life story in order to address how intense and uncomfortable the project could be for Kerr. “If you’re going to trust me telling your story, I’m going to trust you with my story.”During production, Kerr knew it would be awkward for Johnson to be nearby while the actor was recreating deeply personal emotional moments from his life. He found the experience of being on set in Vancouver surreal. “The running joke was that everybody talked about me in the third person, and then [producer] Dave Koplan would go, “He’s right here.” It still has that feeling of talking about myself in the third person.”Kerr was most involved during “fight week,” where he worked alongside Johnson and the stunt team to nail details that serious MMA fans would be sure to notice. Their approach was teaching foundational MMA fight moves—for example, Kerr’s recognizable double-leg takedown—so that Johnson could make it his own and wasn’t confined by trying to mimic Kerr exactly. Safdie’s love for Kerr included aftercare when the cameras stopped rolling. “I know what it’s like when you’re done with a movie and actors leave. It’s hard to have that kind of come down. He’s been burned by people in his life, and I didn’t want him to have that with this. I wanted him to have a good connection with the movie on a deep level.”He’s clearly pulled this part off. Kerr sums up his feelings by recalling a piece of wisdom he received from producer Dave Koplan. “Sometimes you make a movie. Sometimes you create a family, and this created a family who made a movie.”Before we say goodbye, back in a Venice hotel lounge, a member of his entourage makes sure to tell me that I’ve been talking to a legend. And 25 years after his peak, Kerr is reckoning with that legendary status, finally at ease in the feeling that everything has come full circle. As he reflected a week earlier, recalling how his UFC Hall of Fame induction ceremony cemented this new sense of closure: “DJ asked me backstage, ‘How do you feel, brother? You’re home.’ I said, ‘It’s not a feeling. It’s a vibration.’”