Emily Blunt and Benny Safdie don’t share a ton of screen time in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” where Oscar nominee Blunt played rabblerouser-turned-steely-wife Kitty Oppenheimer, and Safdie appeared as “father of the hydrogen bomb” Edward Teller. They did, though, spend time together during the making of the film. Specifically, in the makeup trailer. More specifically, talking about what would become, three years later, Safdie’s lauded solo directorial debut “The Smashing Machine.”
A sports biopic of an entirely different stripe, “The Smashing Machine” stars Dwayne Johnson as iconic MMA fighter Mark Kerr (aka The Smashing Machine), with Blunt portraying his long-time partner Dawn Staples. The film follows Mark and Dawn through horrifically fraught times, as Mark battles an opioid addiction and Dawn struggles to support her mercurial man through personal and professional upheavals. The film was a smash at Venice, where our own Ryan Lattanzio called it “nimbly executed” with “sensational” performances that mark it for awards love, with Safdie walking away with Best Director.
Back in 2022, it was just a years-old idea that Safdie couldn’t let go of, even when deep into work on Nolan’s historical epic. One day in the makeup trailer, as Blunt told IndieWire during a recent interview, Safdie approached her with a strange ask. “He said, ‘You’re friends with Dwayne Johnson, right?’ And I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he goes, ‘Did he ever get the sweater I sent him?’ And I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’” Blunt recalled with a laugh.
Fortunately, Safdie had a little bit of leeway with Blunt, who had long admired his work and was more tickled than confused by the question. “Benny Safdie, just his name is exciting because of what he’s able to do and craft,” she said. “He had jet-fueled independent cinema for me in a way that was just so exciting.”
Safdie was quick to share the broad strokes with his “Oppenheimer” castmate. “They were talking about ‘The Smashing Machine’ in 2019, Dwayne had brought it to him, and then COVID happened, and it all kind of slipped through everyone’s fingers,” Blunt said. “And this is now 2022, in New Mexico, in the makeup trailer! Benny [explained that he] had sent DJ this yellow sweater that Mark Kerr wore with a really creepy note. Not creepy in its meaning, but Benny’s handwriting looks like that of a serial killer. So I think some security guard was like, ‘This will be thrown out in the trash.’”
So, no, Johnson had not gotten the sweater. But Blunt suddenly saw the potential for something big. “I had felt for years that DJ had this sort of untapped well of ability and life experience from the struggle he’s been through to everything he’s witnessed,” she said. “He has a profound curiosity about it. He’s someone who’s willing to talk about it and think about it and share it. He’s not immune to vulnerability.”
In conversation, Blunt’s admiration for Johnson is clear, and so is her interest in making sure other people recognize his talents and capabilities. The actress said the pair clicked “immediately” when they worked together on “Jungle Cruise” in 2018. “He’s a true gent and so sweet and the most polite man I have ever met, ever,” she said. “I saw all of those qualities [before the film], but then when we started working together, we really made each other laugh, and we really gave each other a lot of shit. Suddenly, we had this relationship that was really fun, and as well as one in which I felt that he’s someone you can really talk to. He’s an amazing listener, and everyone feels this way about him. It’s just that he’s also someone who kind of keeps himself to himself.”
Johnson is just as admiring of Blunt. At the Venice press conference for “The Smashing Machine,” he called her his “best friend.” “We just knew we would become fast friends, and there was just a lot of trust,” Blunt said. “Trust is something that can be built, or it’s also just something that is there immediately. Maybe if you’re in the line of work that I’m in, it’s quite hard to trust everybody and their reasons for wanting to be close to you.”
What Blunt said she most admired about Johnson was his range. He was just so much more than she expected: more agile, more present, more real.
“I realized that he was the antithesis of any persona I had previously imagined,” she said. “I thought maybe he was quite like The Rock, and even though I know he’s very proud of the name, now when I hear people calling out to him, ‘Hey, Rock,’ I find it limits him or dehumanizes him in some ways. I’m like, ‘His name’s Dwayne!’ because I think that he’s so much more than just that. [The Rock] is an incredible character that he created, and so I started to wonder how many more bonkers people [he had] lurking inside his enormous infrastructure. He [turned out] to be one of our great character actors.”
After Blunt reconnected Safdie and Johnson, Safdie sent her John Hyams’ 2002 documentary about Kerr (also titled “The Smashing Machine”) to watch while they were still shooting “Oppenheimer.” If Blunt had initially been excited about the possibilities for Johnson and Safdie, the documentary introduced her to an entirely new obsession: Dawn Staples.
“Immediately, I’m very interested in seeing her side of things, because I feel the documentary was made more under the male gaze and there was an enamored sense of how they perceive Mark,” she said. “And they should, because Mark’s incredible and he’s so tender and eloquent and such a walking contradiction. I get why you want to make a documentary about Mark Kerr, I do. But I felt that she was perceived as the ringleader of his demise in that, and I didn’t know that I liked that.”
Even within the confines of Hyams’ documentary, Blunt could see a very different Dawn, one she wanted to know. “I thought, there must be a whole different side to the story of someone who’s living with an addict. Not only an addict, but someone whose life is on the line constantly, whether he’s in the ring or he’s down his own rabbit hole of addiction, someone whose entire identity collapses around him when he loses for the first time,” Blunt said. “Who picks up the pieces, and what do the pieces really look like?”
Fortunately, Blunt said that Safdie was just as interested as she was in exploring Dawn further. “She’s as wild as she is fragile, she is as broken as she is ferocious, and she’s funny and vulnerable, and she needed him desperately,” Blunt said. “When I spoke to her, she’s so reflective and contemplative about her part in things, she owns it, but also owns where she was right. I liked that about her. She was the full spectrum.”
After Safdie, Johnson, and Blunt all officially boarded the film in late 2023, Blunt said she spoke to Staples three times in the lead-up to physical production. Staples, whom Blunt found to be incredibly open, reflective, and just plain “cool,” had much to impart. “People don’t behave as you’d like them to. In movies, we often see people behave as we quite like, it makes us feel good, it makes us feel we’ve got something to live up to,” Blunt said. “I liked that she didn’t have to be likable, my least favorite word to describe a female character on Earth.”
“Even though it’s not a tidy, palatable one at times, it was a love story, and she said that to me: ‘It was a love story. It might’ve it not been a story that everyone would’ve wanted to read, but it was ours,’” Blunt said. “It was important to show those moments of deep connection and passion that they had for each other, and the joy, like a complete euphoric addiction to each other, which is why they couldn’t quit each other. They couldn’t live with each other, they couldn’t live without each other.”
What really got Blunt? “I think the need was very important. That’s what resonated more, her loneliness, her exclusion from things, and what that made her feel. I think she was the kind of girl that needed the bakery, and he gave her crumbs often, and she knows that,” she said.
Blunt spoke to other fighters and their partners as well, and noticed “a very similar pattern” in their stories. “The wives talked about the two weeks leading up to a fight, [and they were] just the most eruptive, hazardous time to live with a fighter,” she said. “There would be holes in the walls all over the house, the relationship would erupt, they would split up, and then win or lose afterwards, then you need that soft place to land. Dawn would have to come back, and she said, ‘We were the perfect recipe because he was controlling and I was codependent.’”
Blunt was there when Staples watched the film for the first time. “I didn’t watch it with her because I was far too nervous. I was very scared, but we all flew into New York to be there when she watched it,” she said. “I think I would find it very frightening to see my whole life, especially my love life, especially things I’m not proud of, played out for everyone to see. And it would be someone else’s interpretation of me. What would that feel like?”
Thank Staples’ uncanny self-awareness for what happened next. “She understood that we were making a movie, and this was going to be my version of her,” Blunt said. But after watching Safdie’s film, Blunt shared, Staples told her, simply, “I feel very vindicated.”
Kerr, Blunt said, also gets it. “He’s completely divine and lovable, but it’s a dark cage, addiction, and she was in it with him, and she bore the brunt of all of that. And he knows that,” she said. “At Toronto, they were both there, and they were so sweet and giving each other hugs and cheering each other on, even though they’re not together anymore. I said to Mark backstage, ‘When I spoke to you and Dawn in the beginning, your story’s completely aligned, completely.’ That is pretty unusual, I think.”
Late in the film, Safdie stages one final battle between Mark and Dawn, an epic eight-and-a-half-minute sequence that plays out in real time, set to Bruce Springsteen’s heartbreaker “Jungleland.” The pair’s fight is fueled by the mundane (a busted dinner party) and the profound (Mark’s addiction, Dawn’s codependence, the constant pressure of professional fighting). It’s an immersive and horrifying showcase for Johnson and Blunt’s prodigious talents.
“It’s such a blur, that day. Knowing that we’re shooting that scene soon … there’s a bracing for impact that is occurring, like a storm brewing,” Blunt said of shooting that sequence. “I never sleep the night before I have to do any of those types of scenes. This one, especially, I knew was going to be a monster, and I knew that the loving environment that Benny creates on set was going to really see us through. But you can feel it; everyone knows what’s going to have to go down today. You kind of feel this force field that everyone’s trying to create for you. It really makes me emotional, and that kind of helps, and it helps that you don’t sleep because … you’re not OK going into it.”
The more Blunt talked about the sequence, the more she seemed to recall how she felt while filming them. “She’s putting down the crudités thinking, ‘I should probably just drop it. Fuck it, I’m not going to drop it.’ And then you see him going, ‘Have I got away with it? Have I got away with it? Fuck, she’s coming back in,’” she recalled. “You see those moments, and we’ve all been there, maybe not to the extreme that these two go, but we’ve all been there, where you know you should drop it, just let it roll off your back, and you can’t and you won’t and you know where it’s going to lead. I think she knew with Mark where it was going to lead.”
Blunt clarifies: she doesn’t think Staples knew exactly where it was going to lead (and no spoilers here), but there was a momentum to the fight that clearly got away from both of them. “When speaking to Dawn and Mark about that night, it did hit a boiling point that neither of them had experienced in that way, where a gun is pulled, police are called, and the histrionics are out of control,” Blunt said. “We felt compelled then to really show the full wattage of what they could be like together in a fight.”
In her recollection now, Blunt doesn’t remember seeing a single light or a camera, as Safdie and the crew so carefully hid them. “So it was very intense, and it makes it exciting as an actor, but it also makes it hard to release its grip from you,” she said. “I feel, as Dwayne has said, part of our souls were left on that bathroom floor, and I kind of think he’s right. The fingerprints of that day are going to be on me for a very long time. We all sat on the bathroom floor, shell-shocked for an hour and a half after it. That whole week, it was a week of fighting.”
She smiled. “It was sponsored by Dwayne’s tequila company, I think.”
At Venice, she recalled asking Safdie what he thought would happen when the film premiered. “He said, ‘I thought people would like it, but I don’t know that I imagined they would get it in this way,’” she recalled.
“That has been the gift of all gifts to all of us. For all the fighters to feel seen by the movie, because it’s not representative of their lives just to show the guy with his fist in the air, it’s not what they live. They live more of what Mark has lived, or they’ve seen it, or they’ve struggled against it. … For Oleksandr Usyk, who is the current heavyweight champ of the world and is one of the best fighters the world has ever seen, for him to come out of that movie and go, ‘This is me, this is my life, this is life’? That was pretty awesome for us.”
As Blunt, Johnson, Safdie, and the rest of the “Smashing” family are ready for whatever awards season might hold for them, Blunt is torn between her joy over the entire experience and her fear about putting it out into the world. It’s funny how it all started, but the serendipity of Blunt’s involvement speaks to something else. It sure seems like she was meant for this one.
“Of all the movies I’ve made recently, I feel ‘Smashing Machine’ was made with more purity than I have words to tell you. There was no strategy or agenda other than to bring something really artistic and challenging onto the screen and tell it in such a unique way,” she said. “We’re geeks for this movie, we love this movie. And because it was made very purely, it’s scarier to put your baby out there when you feel so deeply for it. It’s a bit easier when you’re in a movie where you’re like, ‘I like this movie.’ But then there’s movies that really have your whole heart, and this really has that for us.”
A24 releases “The Smashing Machine” in theaters on Friday, October 3.
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