Exclusive | Why Playing Yourself Is Way Harder Than It Looks – Bas Rutten’s Smashing Machine Dilemma
When Benny Safdie started casting for The Smashing Machine, the indie director faced an interesting problem: who plays Bas Rutten? After all, it’s one thing asking an actor to portray a famous fighter – Dwayne Johnson did precisely that with Mark Kerr. But it’s quite another asking that very fighter to essentially play himself, something Rutten himself found far more complicated than it might seem on the surface.
Bas Rutten Learned Acting Lesson the Hard Way – Being Yourself on Camera Isn’t Easy
The UFC Hall of Famer stepped into his younger self on set, joining Johnson and Emily Blunt for the film based on the 2002 HBO documentary about Kerr’s turbulent rise and fall in late-’90s MMA. Rutten had originally appeared in that documentary, coaching Kerr at a pivotal moment in the fighter’s career. Now, 25 years later, he was being asked to recreate those scenes, but here’s where things got tricky.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with Tim Wheaton, he explained:
“They always say, ‘Oh, you just play yourself.’ Playing yourself is harder than you think. He’s a colorful guy and that’s thankfully on my behavior and I can’t do these things but still it’s… I always compare it to people. If you’re a tough guy and you’re walking on the beach and there’s a group of six girls standing there, beautiful girls, they all stop talking, they start looking at you, start walking different. You start behaving different, you know, because you now become self-conscious. That’s the only thing I was afraid of in that.”
The analogy cuts to the heart of a universal human experience, self-awareness tends to ruin authenticity. When you know you’re being watched, when the cameras are rolling and a crew is standing by, even the most natural personality finds itself second-guessing. Rutten, El Guapo, the colorful personality known for his irreverent humor and larger-than-life presence in MMA circles, worried he’d fall into exactly that trap, becoming almost a caricature of himself rather than capturing his genuine essence from that era.
Safdie’s approach, however, differed dramatically from what Rutten might have expected. Rather than locked-in scripting, the director gave his subject breathing room. He continued:
“All the scenes that I had, of course, there was a script, but Benny Safdie said, ‘Dude, it’s you. Just follow the guidelines, make it your own. Do what you would do.’ So, all these scenes that you saw, there were some more scenes that simply were not used. If you really teach him and he’s really paying attention, since I’ve been teaching my whole life, that made it so much easier.”
Safdie understood something crucial, trying to bottle lightning by having an actor recite every line precisely might work for traditional scripting, but with Rutten, authenticity demanded freedom. The script became scaffolding, not scripture.
On set, Rutten described an experience where his coaching job essentially continued, just with cameras rolling. “For me, it was literally like teaching DJ. I got goosebumps on set every time,” he recalled. Johnson’s commitment to the role meant that Rutten didn’t need to act alongside a stilted performance. He was genuinely coaching Johnson through Kerr’s world – the same way he’d coached the real Kerr decades earlier.
Johnson’s dedication to the role extended beyond mere performance. The actor had studied Kerr‘s mannerisms so thoroughly that Rutten’s wife immediately recognized the authenticity. “My wife said, ‘Oh my God, it’s him. He’s really good,'” Rutten recounted. Johnson had incorporated the real Kerr’s physical peculiarities, his speech patterns, his facial expressions.
The end result speaks for itself. The Smashing Machine premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2025, where it won the Silver Lion for Best Director. Critics praised Johnson’s stripped-down performance, but Rutten’s authenticity, his very presence as the man who actually lived those events, added a documentary-like realism that elevated the entire film. Rather than watching an actor play a coach, audiences were watching the actual coach reflect on a transformative moment in both men’s lives.
The film also features real fighters like Ryan Bader who played Mark Coleman, Oleksandr Usyk as Igor Vovchanchyn, and Satoshi Ishii for Enson Inoue. But Bas Rutten got to play Bas Rutten, the real coach of Mark Kerr.
Bas Rutten has coached many fighters, such as Kimbo Slice, Mark Kerr, and others. He recently put together a workout program where anyone can train alongside the UFC Hall of Fame athlete. The www.thefightingmachine.com features a tracking app, videos, audio, and much more.
