Don’t Pull Your Punches: Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson Begged Costars to Strike Him During Filming – ‘Hit Me!’
Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson got a real taste of what it’s like to be a professional fighter while filming The Smashing Machine.
Ahead of the film’s official release on October 3, Johnson’s portrayal of MMA legend Mark Kerr has received glowing reviews from critics, with many commending the former WWE Superstar’s commitment to the role and the hyperrealistic fight sequences.
Johnson insisted on doing all of his own stunt work for the film, including during one of the film’s most pivotal moments, a recreation of Kerr’s 2000 Pride Grand Prix Final fight against Kazuyuki Fujita.
To ensure that the sequence looked as authentic as possible, ‘The Rock’ revealed that he urged his co-star to punch him for real.
“Benny said, ‘I would never love to never cut away from you in these fights. We have a great stunt double. We have two. I’d love to just use you.’ And I know what that meant,” Johnson told reporters on a recent media roundtable. “So at the end in that scene, we just had to tell our scene partner, who is a fighter, and I said to him, ‘Hey, brother, you’re pulling your punches. You’ve got to lay it in and you’ve got to hit me.’
“He goes, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Benny’s not cutting away, this is the end of the movie. You know this really happened to Mark. You have to lay it in. Just don’t hit me here, you’ll break my jaw. Don’t hit me in my temple, you’ll kill me. But you can hit me here in the cheekbone.’
“He said, ‘I’m not going to do that.’ I said, ‘I need you to hit me.’ He goes, ‘I respect you, I’m not going to do that.’ I asked Benny to come over, and Benny had asked him, and he goes, ‘You have to hit him because I’m not cutting away.’ And then I found out earlier that Bas [Rutten] was listening to this whole thing. And Bas was just like, ‘Just hit him. He’s The Rock. Hit him.’ It’s like whoa. He hit me so hard, and that’s what you see in the movie.”
Based on the 2002 documentary The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr, the film stars Johnson and Emily Blunt, and features several notable MMA personalities, including UFC alum and two-division Bellator champion Ryan Bader, undisputed heavyweight boxing champion Oleksandr Usyk, and former UFC heavyweight champion Bas Rutten.
Check out the official trailer below:
