You have to go back more than a quarter-century to get to the impetus for Dwayne Johnson to play Mark Kerr on screen.
It all started, Johnson said, in his early days in the WWF, now the WWE. Before he was “The Rock,” Johnson was climbing the pro wrestling ladder as Rocky Maivia. He had storylines and matches that involved former UFC fighters Ken Shamrock and Dan Severn.
In “The Smashing Machine,” for which Johnson was nominated for a Golden Globe award, he played pioneering UFC fighter Kerr to critical acclaim. “The Smashing Machine” biopic was based on a documentary of the same name about UFC Hall of Famer Kerr at the peak of his career in the late 1990s. In particular, it details his struggle with addiction.
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The UFC didn’t truly start to take off until 2006. In the early days, there was regular crossover between pro wrestlers and MMA fighters.
“I met (Kerr) in the late ’90s as he was ascending, becoming ‘The Smashing Machine.’ I saw his documentary,” Johnson recently said at a roundtable with The Hollywood Reporter with other current awards hopefuls. “I thought the documentary was really moving because at that time, in the world of MMA and professional wrestling there was still a lot of connected tissue. We’d be in the same venues, the same gyms.
“A lot of those guys in MMA tried professional wrestling because they could make money and they could protect their injuries more in pro wrestling. … There was an epidemic in MMA and pro wrestling at the time with addiction. I lost a lot of friends to addiction who OD’d, didn’t make it back, decided to check out.”
Kerr won the UFC 14 and UFC 15 single-night heavyweight tournaments in 2017, then made a run for Pride in Japan in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Kerr was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame in 2025 by Johnson in Las Vegas.
This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: Dwayne Johnson: Early Kerr meeting planted seed for movie role
