What was it with Amazon MGM Studios sports movies and the pandemic? Rachel Morrison’s “The Fire Inside” took five years to make through fits and starts. Star Ryan Destiny, who portrayed real-life Olympic boxer Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, trained on and off again for five years as the movie was almost killed two different times. Jharrel Jerome’s story was almost more arduous. To portray champion wrestler, Anthony Robles, Jerome persevered through COVID, stopped training for three years, started again, and then saw all his work come to a halt 10 days into shooting “Unstoppable” due to the 2023 guild strikes. Like Robles, who overcame being born with just one leg to reach incredible athletic heights, the movie was, in fact, unstoppable.
READ MORE: “Unstoppable” Review: A Remarkable Story with Jharrel Jerome and Jennifer Lopez [TIFF]
Directed by William Goldberg, the biopic chronicles Robles overcoming family strife and athletic prejudice to achieve his dreams. Starring alongside Jerome is Jennifer Lopez as Robles’ mother Judy, Bobby Carnevale as his adoptive father Rich, Michael Pena as his high school coach, Bobby Williams, and Don Cheadle as his college coach, Sean Charles. The fact Amazon stood by the project is admirable, but Jerome’s commitment to adhering to the physical needs of the role should be the stuff of legend. A process he discussed in fascinating detail during an interview last month.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Playlist: What you went through to prepare for this film is sort of incredible. You trained and then the strike happened, and then you didn’t get to really shoot most of it for what, another five or six months?
Jharrel Jerome: Yeah.
How long did you actually train for this film?
So, we could backtrack even further to before COVID, which is even crazier to think about. I met Anthony at a gym in LA in 2019, which is bizarre to think about. It was not to self-promote here, but it was like two months after I won an Emmy in September [2019], and I remember that the first project I had lined up after that moment was meeting Anthony and spending time with him. We trained for three months, and then in March 2020, as we know what happened, and so we stopped. The irony of this film being called “Unstoppable” is hilarious because of the amount of times we had to stop. We went about a year and a half, and Anthony and I were just texting back and forth. At that point, I had spent time with him in Arizona. I had spent time with his mom. I had slept on his couch. I had wrestled with him, and so there was a passion that I had for it. So throughout COVID, I texted him and we were texting back and forth making sure that we were keeping each other positive about the fact that this film will happen. And I was reminding him, “Listen, man, whatever it takes, if it comes back, I will be there to put in all the work and we bang it out.” Then all of a sudden we get a call saying, “Hey, we’re back and we’re going to go.” And so Anthony and I re-met again. Now I was 22 when I met him, and now I’m all of a sudden 25 years old. All of a sudden, he’s married and has a child now. I’ve almost watched him grow as he’s watched me grow. When we got back to wrestling, we went through a seven-month program, five days a week, wrestling three hours, two to three hours a day. And aside from that, I was training in the gym, and then I was learning how to get on the crutches, and then I was learning to speak like him. So it was almost like I called it a boot camp in its own way.
And then the strike happened.
[But before that,] we started shooting for 10 days.
Wait, for 10 days?
So we do a seven-month boot camp. The last day of boot camp was the day before day one of shooting. So there was no real break. We just went right into it. We actually shot all the family scenes in 10 days, And then it was this excitement. We had one more day in that house. The next week we go to the wrestling sequences and we shoot the whole wrestling part of the movie. And then on that weekend, I got a call saying, “No, you’re not coming to set. The strike just started.” I cried, man, I’m not going to lie. I cried. It almost felt like I was already hanging by a string. And then, as soon as I got that call, I was cut off and it just, but I called Billy, and Billy heard me crying, and he was so there for me. He was so adamant about the fact that we would get this done. And he reminded me that all the work that I put in will not be for nothing, and all the work that Anthony’s put in for his life will not be for nothing. And so I believe that the reason the film really ended up happening is because of the extreme passion that everybody had for it from the producers all the way down to the costumes and the coaches and the choreographers. We all felt like this was so much bigger than us, so nothing was going to stop us. And over the six months, four to five, I don’t even know how long that dang strike was, but however long that was, I still had to maintain the physique. That was the real mental hurdle for me was that I was very much looking forward to a tequila shot and a McDonald’s burger, but I had to continue to hold that off. But I’m honestly grateful man for all of this because I’m now consistently in the gym. I’m now consistently focused on my health and my physique, and that’s because I learned my body and I learned what I can do. And I fell in love with the feeling of it. Had I gone to do this film and it was a three-month part of my life and I just trained intensely for three months, that intensity would’ve traumatized me and I would not gotten back in the gym. And so in hindsight, I’m grateful for how long this took because it ended up sort of shaping me as a growing man beyond just the actor.
During that time were you still sparring and wrestling, or did you have to just take a mental break?
Yeah, I mean, at first it was let’s keep it up, and let’s wrestle, and let’s be in the gym. But the strike, I mean, it was so daunting for all of us. It just never ended and never stopped. So I mean, I probably would’ve been a pro wrestler if I just kept wrestling through those months. I got pretty good. I’m not going to lie. But no, it was mainly for me staying in the gym and staying strong and staying strong because a lot of what I had learned in the wrestling room in the choreography was almost like riding a bike when we got back to it. And yeah, it’s so foggy now, but I remember thinking just eat and stay in the gym and stay motivated, but it wasn’t hard to keep that motivation up when I kept just thinking about Anthony and the fact that we weren’t done with this project. I was only halfway through.
You said you’d done all the family scenes in the home first, which is a big part of the film. You come back, maybe you had another day or two or whatever of the house but it just sounds like the rest of it was mostly physical.
After the strike, we went into what was going to be the grueling part of it all physically, which is why I couldn’t slip at all during those months. I also kept thinking about the money that was put behind me. I had a lot of great resources and a lot of people behind me to get me to where I was. So if I got to set after that strike any less in shape than I was, then I would, first of all, I’d feel so disappointed in myself and I would let a lot of people down, including Anthony. I don’t know if you noticed in the film, I look like I’m gradually getting bigger, and it’s really cool. It’s because at home I’m always in a sweater, so you can’t point my physique out. You could only see a frame. I actually gained four pounds of muscle during the strike and then ended up cutting my weight. So I looked better when I came back from the strike, thankfully. And so when I got into the wrestling stuff, I was kind of like, all right, I feel it. I feel ready. I feel ready to do it. But it felt like two different movies. It felt like a family drama where it was all in this contained space. And then it was an entire sports film on a college campus where we did the college scenes, the wrestling scenes, the hike scene.
No basketball players doing five games in a row, no football player, I mean baseball, whatever. Were there at least physical breaks for you in the shootig schedule?
No, there wasn’t one, no. There was a physical break in terms of Anthony being my body double, so I don’t know if you knew that.
No, didn’t realize.
That was the beautiful part of this experience for me. They called him early on and asked him if he was willing to do all the wrestling sequences with me and a lot of the crutching moments with me to make it easier for Billy in the editing room. So Anthony was there every day I was there. If I was there for 14 hours, he was there for 14 hours. If I had to do seven takes of a wrestling match, he also had to do seven takes of a wrestling match. We were just going back and forth. So technically, yes, I did get that break. There would be about maybe seven minutes of downtime where I water, though I’m not off taking a break. I’m watching him to make sure I see the little things that he’s doing. But other than that, I took no breaks. The other challenge that I had to go through was that I had to stay in shape while maintaining a 14-hour shooting schedule, which didn’t coincide with each other at all. You shouldn’t be on set for 14 hours a day and get the proper sleep, proper nutrition, and proper fitness in. And so I skipped all my lunch breaks. Those hour lunches we get every day, the crew would go off, and I was with either personal equipment that was in my trailer, or luckily we were at a college or we were at a training facility, so there was a gym, and I had to sign in, put in my id, and I would work out for 45 minutes. And then when we got back, I would just stuff my face in between takes to make sure that I had my calorie intake as well. The only break I really had was when I got home for those six hours of sleep before you pop right back up and go for another one. I probably complained a ton more than I know, but in hindsight, I know that I prevailed and pushed through because of my understanding of who Anthony is. No matter how much I could do, no matter how much I could do on the mat or in the gym, it didn’t even come close to what Anthony’s achieved. If I was the one to be honored to tell his story, I knew that I had to just push myself in ways that I never thought I could.
What aspect of the wrestling did you do?
Anthony choreographed the wrestling with me. So in that seven-month training process that I was talking about before shooting, when I say we were wrestling five days a week, I mean, we were doing a mix of wrestling training, which is learning, wrestling, learning how to sprawl, fireman’s carry, taking shots, and then also the choreography element to it. So, almost like this violent dance, I called it to where even though we’re learning how to wrestle, we have to learn how to “movie wrestle.” It has to tell a story. Anthony and his actual coach from college, Brian Stiff, would watch his videos through YouTube or saved clips, and they would actually take the exact moves that he was doing and the exact things that were going on in the match, and we just choreographed it and we made it happen. So it was having to learn and memorize moves. There were eight matches to memorize. It’s like eight dances. It was almost like doing a musical. All of a sudden now I have to all of a sudden learn choreography. And the thing about that is it was so tricky because it’s not like a boxing film where you have to fake it all the way. You can’t knock somebody’s temple over and over on set wrestling. You can’t fake it. You really do have to grapple, and you do have to grab for that strain to be there, for that intensity to be there, even though the moves are choreographed, it’s full throttle, it’s all my weight, it’s all my pressure, and it’s all my power. And so if I mess up a move, I could break my jaw, I could break my nose. I could pop my eardrum.
How do you do it? Do you just let your leg lie there? Because you don’t want to injure yourself by not trying to protect your own leg.
The leg didn’t exist to me. Dead to me. I had to ignore it, and I almost treated it like a tail. So when I did the wrestling scenes, I went on my left knee and I pushed my left knee forward and my right leg was hanging back like a tail. Wherever I was sliding, my leg was just following me, and it was wrapped in a green cast so I didn’t move it. I just kept it following me everywhere, and they were able to digitally erase it. And when it came to actually crutching around and off the mat, I would be on the crutches and I would just hike my leg back so you could just see half of my leg. And then that was also wrapped in green, and so that was also digitally erased. A lot of it was the magic of CGI, but a lot of it was also me just pretty much ignoring that my leg was there, which proved difficult. A lot of times, especially in wrestling, when you don’t have a limb, there are things you can do. There are actual physical things you can do, contort your body, or you have less weight to carry when you do a backflip. So, Anthony, when you watch him wrestle, it is magic. He can climb and fall and move and glide. For me, that was much harder to do with my right leg still being there. There was one move that I remember one moment, I slammed my hand on the mat in frustration. There was one move I couldn’t get and I just couldn’t get it. And we all kept going, “Wow, this is hard to teach. How do we teach?” Then Anthony just pulled up one day and he was like, “I realize that Jarrell won’t ever be able to do it. Only I can do it because I don’t have the limb there. It’s the only way. There’s not enough space for him to do it.”
[Jerome pauses]
I have a lot of BTS stuff. I’m going to be posting a whole ton of stuff, but it is just me, Anthony, and his coach all on a mat watching YouTube clips and talking and having notepads and running things and things not working and things working. And then six months in, Amazon and Ben Affleck come in to watch us wrestle. Anthony goes first and he kills it because he’s Anthony Robles. And then I come hopping onto the mat, terrified, and I do my thing. And that was my first bit of validation that day. Ben looked at me and he was like, “Are you a wrestler? Did you wrestle before this?” And I was like, “Maybe.” I was like, “Guess so.”
I got to be honest, man. Just so relieved for you. When you don’t use part of your body and you’re compensating with something else, you could have screwed up your other knee.
Tremendously.
I’m glad that you at least made it through unscathed. I’m having nightmares in my own head, thinking about what could have happened.
My biggest fear was getting the cauliflower ear that wrestlers love to have. You know about that, right? When you see a wrestler or MMA fighter, I don’t know if you notice, their ears are usually kind of busted up and really messed up. Yeah.
Oh, because of all the mat, right?
So that’s called cauliflower ear. That’s when you bang your ears so much that you lose all the stuff in there and it just swells up and it stays like that. And most wrestlers, they keep that for the rest of their lives as a badge of honor. You could drain it and it hurts like hell. But that was my biggest fear. I’m like, everybody remember, I’m an actor, please, and I need to move on to my next role with normal years.
Was there any benefit to having the emotionally heavy scenes in the home done first before you went to the more physically challenging parts?
Honestly, now that I’m sitting here talking to you about this, I really do love the way it all unfolded, and I love the way we shot it because we got to be in that house day after day and tackle all those scenes all in one. It wasn’t like too much time went away, and maybe Jen and I’s chemistry was lost, or maybe we forgot the importance of certain moments. We got to really bang it out.
I was at the TIFF premiere, and it was a total crowd-pleaser and super emotional for so many people. So, I’m assuming that is a validation for all the hard work that you put into it.
Yeah, a hundred percent. TIFF started this whole press tour for us. I mean, it’s two months later, we’re still going, but it’s like that was the first moment where I saw who Anthony could be to the world, not just to me, and not just to the people on set. When we did the work, I always felt like this was a project that was way larger than me because of what Anthony’s accomplished and who he could speak to from all fields of life. And so I knew the importance of it. I wouldn’t even say validation, because the validation really comes from Anthony. The world could tell me, “You’re a great actor,” but if the guy I play looks at me and says, “Nothing really was me,” and he doesn’t even want to watch his own film, that would be devastating. So when Anthony would just look at me, and he’d be like, “This is getting scary, man. This is getting real scary.” And that was the compliment I needed. But at TIFF, seeing the crowd, I think it was the validation for Anthony and for Judy more than me. This is 30-plus years for Anthony of struggle and of fight, and finally, a room full of strangers who are not there to see him in a wrestling match, but to see his full story and who he is and then stand up for him. He’s been applauded many times in his life, but I think that applause that night was very different from the other ones.
“Unstoppable” is now available on Prime Video
