See Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt Like Never Before in The Smashing Machine Trailer

It’s fashionable nowadays to criticize Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s acting choices, but there was a time not long ago where the wrestler-turned-actor’s natural charisma garnered somewhat different notices. While never celebrated as a prospective awards contender, he was still cheered on as “franchise viagra” on SNL, and if not celebrated by critics, then definitely respected for a boundless charisma and a nature so sunny that “even when he’s not wearing a smile, his facial muscles carry the ghost of one.”

Which is what makes seeing that smile turned mirthless in the latest trailer for Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine seem haunted and eerie.

“For me, a day without pain is like a day without sunshine,” Johnson’s Mark Kerr says in the new teaser. A day without pain, or sunshine, also feels like anathema to Johnson’s onscreen persona of the last 20 or so years—which might be why the role is already earning raves out of Venice where the film also picked up the Silver Lion for Safdie’s direction. Somehow, it would seem, sun in that smile has gone out. It’s been replaced by a steel we have not seen since Pain & Gain. 

In Smashing Machine, Johnson plays Kerr, a two-time UFC Heavyweight champion and former wrestler who was the subject of a 2002 HBO documentary of the same name. A mixed martial artist who admitted to struggling with substance abuse and professional setbacks, Kerr appears an apropos subject matter for Safdie. The previous two films he co-directed with brother Josh, Good Time and Uncut Gems, were relentlessly bleak in their tales which intersected with the sports world, and together they promise a film that’s likely thornier than the conventional sports movie trailer Smashing Machine offers above.

Johnson definitely shows a side in this sizzle reel we haven’t seen from him in over a decade. Here is the bold and eccentric character actor who could steal scenes from John Travolta in conventional studio fare like Be Cool, and be the heart of the more enigmatic Southland Tales. He even allowed himself to become the clay with which Michael Bay would paint his scathing portrait of American greed and arrogance in Pain & Gain. 

Since the beginning of his pivot from wrestling to film acting, Johnson has proven to have deep pools of charisma and a more ambiguous reserve of talent that has only been occasionally tapped. Yet there’s a reason Arnold Schwarzenegger seemed to designate him heir apparent, even if in lighthearted if energetic schlock like The Rundown. 

Johnson has chosen not to deeply tap into that talent over the last 12 years, but it was there faintly when getting to riff on Big in Jumanji, and it could have been there when acting opposite talents like Emily Blunt. Indeed, the pair worked together in 2021’s Jungle Cruise, a by the numbers studio product that asked Johnson and Blunt to, in theory, modernize Bogie and Hepburn, but in truth amounted to glorified cast members on a theme park ride. 

Yet in this new Smashing Machine trailer, the pair suggest tangible chemistry when Blunt’s Dawn tends to a wounded boyfriend with empathy but also a guarded weariness. Johnson and Blunt both appear out of their respective milieus in the setting of gritty drama or grittier gym. Granted, we’ve seen Blunt adapt between disparate roles and genres before—including opposite Benny Safdie in a quite different biopic, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer—but having real, pained sparks with Johnson marks something new. With any luck, it’ll hit as hard as Kerr in the octagon.

A24 releases Smashing Machine on Oct. 3.

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