RING OF POWER

Tipped for awards glory, true-life wrestling drama THE IRON CLAW tells the extraordinary story of the Von Erich family, champions in the ring and cursed in life. Total Film grapples with director Sean Durkin and hears from stars Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White and Harris Dickinson to pin down how such awe-inspiring triumph can come from such terrible adversity…

‘WHEN I WAS A KID, I USED TO GET ALL MY FRIENDS TOGETHER AND MAKE THEM WRSTLE,’

smiles writer/director Sean Durkin, explaining why he found it easy to shoot the ‘full-blown action’ scenes in true-life wrestling drama The Iron Claw despite his earlier movies, Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest, containing nothing of the sort. ‘I was about 10. I’d write my friends characters and I used to make my mum film it. So in some ways I’ve been thinking about it my whole life – shooting the wrestling and choreographing it was second nature.’

For The Iron Claw, named after a signature wrestling move, Durkin took it up a notch or 10. Instead of shooting in his back garden, he had production designer James Price fashion an auditorium from a huge furniture showroom in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And instead of his string-limbed mates, he had a pumped-up Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White and Harris Dickinson smacking it down in front of a baying crowd.

‘We filled it with as many people as we could get, and the first scene we shot, there’s someone playing Skandor Akbar, who was one of the most famous villains of that era,’ says Durkin. ‘They walked out before we’d even started to set up and hundreds of people started viciously booing! I was like, “Wow, they are in!” They were such a big part of creating the energy and giving the actors that real vibe to play off. It felt like real events. We’d run the whole match, too. We’d choreograph the whole thing. Mátyás [Erdély, the director of photography] and I approached it like we would any scene: “What’s the emotion here? What are we going to do? Is it going to be one shot? Is it going to be handheld? Is it going to be three shots?” We’d shoot it based on emotion, not just to have stunts.’

But what stunts.

‘The drop kick was hard,’ says White, who’s used to the intensity of the kitchen in Disney+ drama The Bear but here piled on 40lbs of muscle to be ring-ready.

‘I was scared of the drop kick, I’m not gonna lie,’ laughs Dickinson, whose work in Beach Rats, Triangle of Sadness and Scrapper, though mightily impressive, never took him to these extremes. ‘And there was some crazy stuff that Zac did off the top rope that was ridiculous.’

Efron winces. ‘There was a moment when I jumped off that top rope and Chavo [real-life champion wrestler Chavo Guerrero Jr., who consulted on the film and plays The Sheik] was under me, I’m about to land on him, and I just remember how far away he was. He was so small and I was like, “This is not going to end well…”’

READY TO RUMBLE

Born in Canada, Durkin grew up in England. He had wrestle mania from an early age – he’d watch WWF and WCW on telly, and his dad would take him to live events at the Royal Albert Hall whenever there was a tour – and he knew just what to pitch when he sat down with Tessa Ross, the former head of Film4. In 2016, Ross and Juliette Howell, former TV head of Working Title, launched House Productions.

‘Tessa Ross said, “If you could do anything, what would it be?” I’d just been thinking about it recently, and I said, “Well, the Von Erichs are the dream project.” So we started working on it together.’

For those whose familiarity with wrestling extends to the knowledge that movie stars Dwayne Johnson and John Cena used to glisten with oil, know that the Von Erichs are wrestling royalty. Patriarch Fritz Von Erich (here played by Holt McCallany) was a three-time world champion, and he trained his six sons to follow in his giant footsteps. Kevin (Efron), Kerry (White) and David (Dickinson) had particular success in the 80s and 90s, also becoming champions. But the family story that happened outside of the ring is even more remarkable. No spoilers here, but if Total Film might trade fight Lily James stars as Pam Adkisson, who marries wrestler Kevin games for just a second in order to quote the movies’ famous Philly fighter Rocky Balboa, ‘Nobody is gonna hit as hard as life.’

‘IT ’S A FA M I LY DRAMA. IT ’S A CELEBRATION OF BROTHERHOOD’

SEAN DURKIN

‘It’s a family drama,’ says Durkin, who grew up a huge fan of the Von Erich siblings. ‘It’s a celebration of brotherhood. The family is so large and it’s such an epic story, it felt like this mythical American Greek tragedy.’

Before speaking to Durkin and reading the script, none of the leading actors was aware of the Von Erichs and their incredible story in and out of the ring. Here was a story about love, loss and learning, about deep-rooted concepts of masculinity, about ferocious ambition and the terrible hardships that come with sporting success, and about the fallout of that. But most of all it was about camaraderie and wisdom.

‘It seems like it’s too much to happen to one family,’ says Efron, leaning forward in his chair. ‘The fact it was all real…’ He takes stock. ‘It didn’t feel as much of a wrestling movie as it was a really great movie about family, and loss.’

In fact, tragedy befell the Von Erichs to such a bewildering extent that the family was considered cursed. But to continue with Rocky’s wisdom: ‘It ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.’ Efron agrees: ‘The film is ultimately being able to triumph. It’s really deep.’

‘I wasn’t familiar [with the Von Erichs],’ says White. ‘But there was this mythicism and also a fantasy aspect because the story is so unbelievable. How could so much happen to this one family? These men were larger than life.’

Dickinson offers a rueful smile. ‘Whenever WWF came to London, I’d go to see it with my mate. I was a bit of a fanboy. I wanted Rey Mysterio to kick me in the head. But I wasn’t aware of this era of wrestling. The delicacy of this story was really intriguing to me.’

All of the actors were in awe of Durkin’s sure touch when it came to fashioning reams of material into what is certain to be one of the films of 2024 – The Iron Claw succeeds as a rousing sports drama, a piercing character study and a nuanced adult drama that’s devoid of clichés. But then Durkin is drawn to studying families of all stripes and colours.

‘I feel like I’ve made a family trilogy,’ he grins. ‘Martha…, The Nest and this are all about… I don’t want to say strange families, but particular families, very different kinds of families. Families and a sense of belonging and ideas of masculinity and how they can crush people in different ways, or whether you can fight through those things.’

So where does that come from? Does Durkin himself have a ‘particular’ family? ‘Yeah, definitely, I have a pretty unusual family, and I made a lot of families along the way. When I was young, I got very close to my friends’ families, and I went to boarding school and made a family there. The idea of brotherhood.’ Does he care to expand on just why he considers his own family to be unusual? Beyond moving around a lot, for Durkin was also uprooted to Manhattan when he was 12. ‘Not really,’ he says. ‘Just… unconventional. Which leads me to love the particularities of different kinds of family. Not judging character, not judging what are family values. I think they’re sort of arbitrary. Families decide what their values are and then people are raised in them and accept them as fact, then get out into the world and realise it’s not the only way it can be.’

Interestingly, the cast quickly made their own family unit on the Baton Rouge set. Just as the Von Erich boys banded together in pursuit of their goals, so the actors playing them formed an unbreakable alliance.

White shrugs. ‘It was so easy. Having that time with Chavo and these guys before we got to filming, trying to work out this new skill as best

we could, was like a real shorthand in friendship and camaraderie. And they’re all lovely guys. It felt easy to care.’

‘We all felt like fish out of water [at first],’ adds Efron. ‘Putting on the wardrobe and getting into it. We were all together in that experience.’ ‘We were all joined in insecurity,’ nods White. ‘Humbled at the same time,’ chuckles Dickinson.

Durkin, naturally, was delighted by what he was witnessing. And somewhat astonished. He’d chosen the actors for what he thought they would bring to the internal character work, and had never once asked them to pile on the pounds of muscle necessary for wrestlers, wary that he’d then be guilty of pushing them in a merciless manner, much as Fritz pushed his sons to be champions. But then…

‘We were shooting at the ranch,’ Durkin remembers. ‘I came back and heard music blasting and Harris, Jeremy and Zac are lifting weights and taking ice baths. Just hanging out. They were like, “Hey. You want in?”’

Efron’s laugh bounces around the room like a man in a leotard pinging off ropes. ‘We were all going hard between takes,’ he says. ‘Push-ups, ice baths. These guys wanted to get at it. It was fun to be in the ring, because we could one-up each other, and to see somebody crush it was really motivating to get in there and nail it.’

Not that they’re saying they got to the level of the guys who do this for a living. So while we’ve all heard stories of how Robert De Niro could have been a real boxer (Raging Bull) or Tom Cruise a genuine pool shark (The Color of Money), these actors have too much respect to make such wild claims.

‘There was the realisation that we were doing this for four months,’ says White. ‘Working with guys like Chavo and these other professional wrestlers, you realise just how demanding it is, and how these men we were portraying were on the road 200-days plus a year, and maintaining that physicality.’

‘These guys have shows the year round, and the travel life, the tour life,’ reiterates Efron. ‘Chavo’s family are all professional wrestlers. He comes from a long line of pro-wrestling heritage. All of us left this set with tremendous respect for these guys.’

Chavo was on set every day. The more he saw just how much the actors were into it, the more he pushed them. And it was just what they desired, insists Efron. ‘We took an extra beating but it was definitely worth it,’ he says, his grin as wide as his pecs.

LORDS OF THE RING

Before writing the script, Durkin made a point of not meeting with Kevin Von Erich, who’s the lynchpin of the movie, or with any of the extended family. There are, after all, extensive videos out there (‘He’s an open book, wears his heart on his sleeve,’ says Durkin), and the filmmaker didn’t want to be in a position where he felt beholden to favour a particular take on the story. Likewise, the actors studied videos to get a handle on accents, mannerisms and more – Dickinson points out there are several sides to the brothers, who naturally behaved differently according to if they were in the ring, in promo mode, or in quieter, more private moments – but avoided any meet-ups.

Durkin did reach out, however, in preproduction, to inform Kevin and the family of his intentions, and everyone finally got to have a group hug after the Dallas premiere in November 2023.

‘Meeting Kevin and just being able to sit and talk with him was one of the most gratifying

‘WE TOOK AN EXTRA BEATING, BUT IT WA S DEFINITELY WORTH IT ’

ZACEFRON

The movie is built on the dynamic of a family going through upheaval moments of my life,’ says Efron. ‘I got to see Kevin at this phase of his life, with all of his family, which is a massive family, and in such a happy place. He’s almost like a guru. He has this ethereal quality about him. It’s beautiful to sit with a guy like that, knowing everything he’s been through. I can’t put it into words. He’s the kind of guy who gives me hope for the future. He loved the movie, and specifically he loved the relationship between the brothers, and when he told me that, it was everything.’

The film received an ecstatic reception, and the praise has only snowballed since, with many critics and insiders tipping it for multiple Oscar nominations. Often when the subject of awards buzz is raised in interviews, filmmakers play it down, not wanting to count chickens for fear of having egg on their face. But Durkin openly says that he’d welcome the laurels.

‘Of course!’ he says. ‘I’ve done my part. A24 has huge belief in this movie, I have huge belief in this movie. Yeah. We want people to see it first and foremost, and whatever happens after that, happens. I feel very proud of it and I’m very excited for people to see it.’

You’ll want to be in the front row for this one. It’s the main event.

THE IRON CLAW OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 9 FEBRUARY.