The Smashing Machine, a dramatization of former mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr’s rise and fall, premiered at the Venice Film Festival earlier this week and will open in theaters Oct. 3. Kerr, 56, described his emotional state the day before the premiere as “vibrational,” saying he was trying to steady himself as audiences prepared to see his life portrayed on screen by Dwayne Johnson and shaped by writer-director Benny Safdie.
Speaking by Zoom a week before the premiere, Kerr said he had been “trying to try to wrap my head around what's in front of me,” and that keeping a clear head had been a priority. He acknowledged the difficulty of entrusting his personal history — including a battle with painkiller addiction and a volatile relationship that he says pushed a promising fighting career to the brink — to filmmakers and public consumption.
The film is written and directed by Benny Safdie, who co-directed the 2019 crime drama Uncut Gems. The Smashing Machine charts Kerr’s experiences in the early years of mixed martial arts as well as the personal struggles that accompanied his public success. According to Kerr and early reviews, the movie portrays both the professional highs he reached and the private lows that imperiled a career on the cusp of historic achievement.
Johnson, known primarily for large-scale action roles and blockbuster fare, takes on the unusual assignment of playing a living fighter’s troubled life. Kerr said the choice to have Johnson portray him required trust and a willingness to accept a degree of distance from his own story. He described feeling the moment as “absurd” at times but said he had tried to “roll with” the experience.
Kerr has lived much of his story in the public eye, and the new film revisits episodes he has long discussed: a dependence on prescription painkillers and a strained, volatile relationship that coincided with his ascent in professional fighting. Those elements are central to Safdie’s adaptation, which places intimate, personal struggles alongside sequences of competition and training.
Critics at Venice and industry observers have noted Safdie’s stylistic shift in taking on a biographical drama after the kinetic intensity of his previous work. The Smashing Machine frames Kerr’s narrative through close character study while also navigating the ethics of dramatizing real trauma. Kerr said he was aware of that tension and eager to see how audiences respond to an account he lived through and later shared publicly.
The film’s Oct. 3 release sets it up for broader public scrutiny and discussion beyond the festival circuit. Kerr, reflecting on the weeks leading up to the Venice showing, said he was focused on maintaining perspective and letting viewers draw their own conclusions about the life onscreen. He declined to predict how the film would reshape his public image but emphasized that handing over his story to Safdie and actors like Johnson was, for him, an act of faith in the filmmaking process.
As The Smashing Machine reaches theaters, it adds to a growing list of sports and personal-drama films that explore addiction and the human cost of competitive success. For Kerr, the experience of seeing his life rendered on film has been at once unnerving and cathartic, a continuation of a publicly lived narrative that is now available to new audiences in a dramatic form.
