The box office may have been disappointing, but Benny Safdie’s “The Smashing Machine” still has its champions. In fact, it has enough of them that A24 is justifiably pursuing its awards season prospects. On Tuesday night, Josh Brolin drove from Santa Barbara to the Academy’s Lynwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood to moderate a wonderfully entertaining Q&A with Safdie and stars Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson. And, yes, he’s one of those fans.
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Set primarily in the early 00’s, “Smashing” finds Johnson transformed into Mark Kerr, a pioneering UFC fighter, who likely doesn’t fit whatever preconceived notions you may have for his profession. Blunt portrays Kerr’s wife at the time, Dawn Staples, a woman battling her own demons. The film saw Safdie win the Best Director prize following its premiere at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.
In many ways, and as many of these talent-hosted Q&As are, it was something of a lovefest. While Brolin and Johnson, longtime friends, have never worked on screen together, the “Dune” star appeared in “Sicario” with Blunt while she and Johnson starred in “Jungle Cruise.” That relationship was so powerful that when Blunt saw a Johnson as Kerry, under 23 pieces of prosthetics for the first time, she cried.
“It was so beautiful. I love him. I know him. We’ve been pals for years,” Blunt says. “He’s never allowed to disappear. He can’t. I’ve never seen a reaction like what he garners when he comes into a place, and it was like he walked in as Mark – the demeanor was shapeshifted in a way that was so wild. Everyone went quiet. It was like he changed the air in the room, and the thing that made me cry was that I felt this relief wash over him that he could disappear, and it was like he came home or something. It was so beautiful. It stopped my heart, and we stopped all of our hearts at the camera test. It was wild. Everyone just went silent.”
After acknowledging how weird it must have been for Johnson, she adds, “We were so moved.”
For Brolin, witnessing Johnson’s performance as Kerr was something of a revelation. In his view, Kerr is one of the saddest characters he’s ever seen, and Johnson is “one of the most joyous people” he knows. “It really made me sad watching it. I was like, ‘What did he do for that long? It’s not fake. I know it’s acting, but then there’s a point where it’s not acting. So what was that?”
Johnson takes a momentary pause before giving perhaps his most heartfelt explanation of his performance. A commentary that either got lost through most of the initial “Smashing” press tour or, perhaps, Johnson realized this was the time to share.
“It was a few things,” Johnson says. “It was my dad who’s not here anymore. And the complicated relationship that I had with my dad. And in many ways, my dad was in a way like Mark, who struggled and struggled with his own addictions, who was a pro wrestler at a time when Mark was an MMA fighter. Paycheck to paycheck, big star, but just struggled man. And then had a really complicated relationship with his son, and then he had an extremely complicated relationship with other children that he had that I didn’t know about until he died. And just there was so much of my dad in that. And there was also so much of my own experience of growing up and seeing these guys, many of my friends who struggled just like Mark, who weren’t as lucky or as strong as Mark, and they’re walking in the clouds, and they checked out through addiction, through overdoses. And Mark overdosed twice,” Johnson says he left a message to Brolin about that, “that he was lucky to be alive. A few of my friends checked out on their own. They just couldn’t handle the pressure.”
Johnson continues, “The pressure is the thing I think that I come back to with this character because you think with Mark Kerr and fighters, men and women, boxers, actors, us in this room, it’s not the wins in the losses. Sure, they matter, but it’s the pressure and how we deal with pressure, and then some deal with it good and some struggle sometimes. So, it was that.”
But it was also another family member who informed the performance, his mother.
“I would watch her just want to be loved and want some love from a man who she had committed her life to and gave up all of her dreams, much like Dawn to this man and his dreams,” Johonson says. “When Emily walked into the locker room in Japan, I say Emily because it was very personal and unscripted, I ignored her, and you see the look on her face. And I’ve seen that before with my dad and my mom. So, it was that too.”
Lastly, Johnson thinks his portrayal was about just trying to find grace in Kerr’s life. He notes, “Here’s a guy who is just trying and wants the world. And he is intellectually aware enough that man, if I had him, maybe a little bit more, I wouldn’t be in this position, but also I feel like there’s more for me, and I want the world, and I want this thing that’s going to change my life. And then at the end, he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get anything. He loses everything. And that shower scene, which was so important, I thought, because we’ve all been there in that moment where I feel like you of surrender and acceptance, and so the grace from sobriety, and I feel like Mark is one of the lucky ones.”
Changing the subject slightly, Johnson adds, “Sometimes when you do something like this, and we talked about maybe it is when you hit your fifth level of life. Maybe forties, fifties, things begin to change. You look at the world in a different way, and there’s a little voice that is behind your rib cage, and you’re like, ‘I want to do more. I think there’s more, I don’t know what it is, but I think it’s this.’ And sometimes you feel like you can do it, but then sometimes you need some friends who can say, ‘You can’t do it. Yeah, you can do it.’ You just don’t know sometimes. I was up in Vancouver and we were shooting. [Benny] just sent me a video, and I’ll never forget it. Four words I want to get right. He said, ‘This is your time.’ He said, ‘I love you,’ and just ended the message.”
Brolin responds, “It is. It is your time, because this is to be celebrated. These kinds of movies need to be celebrated. We’re in that four-second mentality, and this is real-life stuff. This is a mirror. You have your mirrors and then you have your roller coasters, you have your entertainment, and you have those things that show us who we are and what we need to work.”
As for Safdie, he revealed some unexpected inspirations for the film, including “Rocky 3,” but the surprise was when Brolin brought up a celebrated boxing film that was released in 2008. Brolin begins, “I don’t know if it’s bad to bring it up ‘The Wrestler’…”
Safdie sheepishly replies, “I actually have not seen ‘The Wrestler.'”
Brolin is dumbfounded, as is the audience for that matter (someone even hisses), he replies, “What?”
“I have not seen ‘The Wrestler.’ It’s breaking news right now,” Safdie admits, trying to break the tension. “Because it’s one of those things where, you know, I’ve always wanted to do a fight movie of some kind. And so you think about it, it’s in your head, and then when there’s something that approaches it, you’re like, ‘Oh, I haven’t done it yet. So, I don’t want to see it. Think of things.’ You know what I mean? You want to preserve the thing that you wanted to do. And this has been, ever since I started boxing and saw the world of that, the camaraderie and the community of that, I need to do something in this somewhere.”
Still surprised, Brolin notes, “At some point, you started boxing.”
“Yes,” Safdie replies.
“You don’t look like you did boxing,” Brolin replies with his trademark grin as the audience laughs.
Safdie, completing getting it, explains, “Yes, because I haven’t since COVID. I did for 10 years.”
A stunned Broline retorts, “Did you really?”
“I did. And then I would spar, and then I got set up for an amateur fight that I was basically being set up to lose,” Safdie explains. “So, I was training really hard. I did a lot of sessions sparring. And when I stopped remembering words is when I said, ‘I’m good.'”
And if “Smashing,” Johnson, Blunt, and Safdie can pull off more of these highly entertaining award season meet and greets, they might be too.
“Smashing Machine” is available to rent or own on digital download sites
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Editor-at-Large Gregory Ellwood is one of the entertainment industry's most respected journalists and critics. Based in Los Angeles, he's the only current awards expert who previously worked on Oscar campaigns at a major movie studio. Over the years, he has written for the LA Times, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Vox, among others. He also co-founded the entertainment news site HitFix, which spawned a legion of influential Emmy and WGA Award-winning alumni.
