As an adolescent, Dwayne Johnson and his family bounced around the country, from urban North Carolina to suburban Connecticut. But there was one constant: the dysfunction.
“My own mom and dad had an explosive and volcanic relationship,” he recalls. “My dad was a pro wrestler at a time when it was the Wild West. There wasn’t million-dollar contracts. It was paycheck to paycheck and just trying to survive. And my dad struggled with his addictions and focused on his career and himself, while my mom was at home, raising me. She had to give up her own dreams and support the man that she loves. All she wanted was to be seen, and she was never seen. And I grew up watching that kind of decline in a relationship when a man battles his own demons. I watched their fights. I heard their fights, which is even worse.”
For the 26-year span of his acting career, Johnson compartmentalized the pain and instead focused on breezy tough-guy roles in such billion-dollar-plus juggernauts as “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” and “Furious 7.”
“For years, I didn’t know that could actually serve as a landing place for me to be able to put all this trauma you go through into my work,” he explains. “I was probably scared to go there.”
But in 2017, he felt the courage to plumb the past and began pursuing the life rights of MMA fighter Mark Kerr, whose drug addiction fettered his career as a two-time UFC heavyweight champ in the late ’90s. The result is A24’s “The Smashing Machine,” a career pinnacle for Johnson, who sinks so thoroughly into a protagonist both bruising and bruised that he is unrecognizable.
Variety will celebrate Johnson with the Creative Impact in Acting Award at the 2026 Palm Springs International Film Festival. The superstar, who received his first-ever Golden Globe nomination for his work in “Smashing Machine,” is set to receive the honor on Jan. 4 during Variety’s annual brunch.
With the role, he didn’t merely confront his own rocky past. Johnson, who parlayed his own professional wrestling stardom into movie A-lister, follows on the heels of several recent actresses long been defined by their bodies rather than their bodies of work who delivered revelatory performances including Demi Moore (“The Substance”), Nicole Scherzinger (“Sunset Boulevard”) and Pamela Anderson (“The Last Showgirl”). For actors, that opportunity and feat is even rarer. But when Johnson first approached Benny Safdie in 2019 with the idea of bringing Kerr’s story to the big screen, the director recognized Johnson’s potential.
“He said, ‘I want to make this film with you. I know how to make it. I’m going to write the script on spec,’” Johnson says of Safdie, who had worked exclusively with his brother Josh in the past on such acclaimed indies as the Adam Sandler starrer “Uncut Gems” and the Robert Pattinson star vehicle “Good Times.” Johnson met with both brothers but says “Smashing Machine” was always developed as a solo effort by Benny.
“After ‘Uncut Gems,’ I felt like they were probably having their conversations about going in different directions,” he says.
The director and actor’s vision quickly dovetailed thanks to their shared experience of being in the destructive orbit of substance abuse.
“I realized how much we had in common. I said, ‘Benny, I’ve lost 15 friends to addiction and suicide. Perhaps this could serve as a beacon or lighthouse to people who are struggling with addiction,” Johnson remembers. “And Benny began sharing with me everything that he had experienced with his own family members and addictions.”
In fact, Safdie’s experiences shaped a riveting eight-minute scene near the end of “Smashing Machine,” in which Johnson and co-star Emily Blunt, who portrays Kerr’s girlfriend Dawn Staples, play out the culmination of their co-dependent spiral.
“Benny goes, ‘If you guys could wind up on the floor, that would really mean a lot to me,’” Johnson says of the bathroom scene. “And I said to him, ‘Why the floor?’ And he paused and said, ‘Well, I’ve been through that. I know what it’s like to hold someone while they’re kicking and screaming. You don’t want to let go.’ And then I realized that’s why the story connected so deeply with us.”
Johnson says it was a first for him — to have an opportunity to sit in his pain along with the audience. “It was the most freeing I have ever felt in my entire career,” he says. “When you make these blockbuster films, you have the responsibility of making the audience feel good and the choices you make [are dictated by] the character’s likability. And for the first time, every shot, every day, regardless of the scene, that never crossed my mind.”
