Benny Safdie knew Dwayne Johnson could play Mark Kerr when he met with him for The Smashing Machine

Dwayne Johnson, despite being a super famous brand nowadays, has tried his hand at different kinds of roles in the past, even as he was being pegged as the next Arnold Schwarzenegger. While there are no shortage of “safe bets” where he got to play a role he was at home with, his resume will still included films like Southland Tales, Be Cool and Snitch, where his size was a factor, but he wasn’t an all-out badass. Johnson would even dabble in family movies. He will next be featured in Red One, which comes from his Jumanji director Jake Kasdan and puts an action twist on the holiday.

Recently, GQ profiled Johnson and spoke with him, Benny Safdie and Emily Blunt on his upcoming dramatic turn in The Smashing Machine. The story of Mark Kerr deals with an athlete who faced depression, and Safdie mentions that he knew Johnson had it in him to do a role like this when he first met with him. Safdie explains,

You really understand the fears, the love, the sadness, the happiness. If somebody’s open to doing that and talking about that stuff, then they’re going to be able to give a great performance. Because of how physically strong he is, I don’t know if a lot of people give him that opportunity.”

Johnson would reveal some intimate details about some hardships he faced when he identified with Kerr’s life, “I didn’t have anybody to turn to. I didn’t have a mentor, I didn’t have a big brother. So it was like, Oh, I need to figure all this shit out on my own. So you figure out the shit on your own, and then the shit you don’t figure out, well, guess where it goes?” Johnson points toward somewhere deep inside his rib cage: “In there.”

His co-star, Emily Blunt, would add that Johnson is “someone who has to be on display. He’s someone who has to give the appearance of invincibility and someone who is immune to struggles, someone who can cope.” Johnson says this film is an opportunity to shed his usual persona, “I look what I look like. I am what I am. There is no: ‘Oh, Rock is just gonna disappear.’ You know what I mean? However, to be able to do that in Smashing Machine, with the greatest of makeup artists—in a way, it was really freeing for me.”

Safdie recalls that the prosthetics on Johnson for the film made him so unrecognizable that when they filmed a scene, none of the extras knew it was him, “It was just funny because I remember him walking around and you’d hear people saying, ‘When’s The Rock going to get here? I wonder when he’s going to get here.’ You’d hear all these people talking, and meanwhile he’s walking amongst them.”