TORONTO – Dwayne Johnson has been part of some incredible stunts in his action movie career, but the physical challenge of changing his voice for his latest role was a different kind of test altogether.
The A-list Hollywood star is generating massive buzz for his performance in The Smashing Machine, in which Johnson plays former UFC star Mark Kerr. Johnson, along with director Benny Safdie and co-star Emily Blunt, worked closely with Kerr on the project, and the results have been astonishing according
to early reviews (the movie is currently screening at international film festivals, with a North American wide release set for Oct. 3).
Johnson sat down for a conversation with Cameron Bailey at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, and he went into detail on how he worked to capture every aspect of Kerr’s being, right down to his distinct voice.
“And then there was the voice transformation because Mark Kerr, he’s this walking contradiction of… a beast of a man, beautiful human being,” Johnson said. “He’s so soft-spoken and so kind and gentle and tender and I worked with Liz Himelstein, who was Emily’s voice coach on Oppenheimer and a few others, Emily connected me with Liz. It’s fascinating, because I had not gone through that process before of modulating and creating a different voice, and when you speak to Liz, she is amazing, because she said something to me earlier on, ‘I’m going to say something to you, and if it registers to you, you can hold on to this as you build this character.’
“She goes, ‘You speak from the ground up. Here, up, and out.’
“I go, ‘OK.’
“She goes, ‘Mark speaks from here [points to throat], very soft. So think about that as you’re talking like Mark. Have it be from here, very soft.‘ So there’s that transformation, too.”
Having starred in countless action and adventure films, as well as building his name as one of the most popular professional wrestlers of all time, Johnson is famous for his incredible physique. But that doesn’t mean he could just walk on set as “The Rock” to play a future UFC Hall of Famer.
Johnson had to undergo an extensive prosthetic routine each shoot day, estimating that the process took “three to four hours” to shape his face like Kerr’s, a transformation overseen by two-time Academy Award winner Kazu Hiro.
Even that was just a part of the puzzle as Johnson and Safdie realized early on from studying footage of Kerr that the actor would have to do something he’d rarely been asked to do before: Get bigger.
“His build was something that you just don’t see,” Johnson said. “It’s like a combination of a sprinter and a wrestler and he’s just this incredible athlete, so Benny said early, ‘I don’t know if you’ve ever been told this before, but I think you’re going to need to gain weight.’”
“I think I said, ‘How do I say this? Puffy. Like, bigger,’” Safdie said. “He said instantly, ‘I totally get what you mean and give me this amount of time.’”
None of those physical transformations would have made a difference if Johnson couldn’t embody the emotional aspects of Kerr’s journey and he credited Blunt – who Johnson calls “one of the greatest actors of all time – and Safdie with creatine the ideal environment for Johnson to put on the performance of a lifetime.
“I think the internal part was the biggest challenge because I knew where I and we had to go internally … you realize and I realized very fast in order to get the places we went, in order to go to the places we were going to go to, you have to have love and then you have to have trust,” Johnson said. “And the love and the trust, that allows for vulnerability, and I could not – we could not have done that without this love and trust and vulnerability that we have.”
