Watching “The Smashing Machine,” you may find yourself squinting as if trying to puzzle through an optical illusion. How can that guy who your brain objectively knows is Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson look so much like the Rock, but also not?
What’s different, beyond the shock of seeing the Rock with hair? Is it the eyes? The ears? Are you misremembering the shape of the nose of one of the most famous humans on Earth? Or did you have it wrong in your head all along?
A lot has been made of the Rock’s on-screen transformation, with some describing the actor as “unrecognizable” in his portrayal of mixed-martial-arts pioneer Mark Kerr. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Kerr struggled with addiction while popularizing ultimate fighting, a sport that Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) called “barbaric” and “human cockfighting,” leading to its ban in many states.
But the magic trick of this movie isn’t that Johnson looks exactly like Kerr, a man whom only his family, friends and die-hard UFC fans would be able to pick out of a lineup, but that for two hours and three minutes, he looks so unlike the guy from the “Jumanji” and “Fast & Furious” franchises that you might just forget it’s him.
“The power of allowing him to disappear, allowing an audience to take somebody that’s maybe one of the most recognizable people on the planet — to be able to take that person and change their face in a way that’s so nuanced, and yet they still come through — is just remarkable,” writer-director Benny Safdie (“Uncut Gems”) tells me over Zoom.
It’s a trick that required Johnson to sit in a makeup chair for three or four hours every morning, getting up to 23 prostheses and a wig applied, in addition to the 30 pounds of muscle he gained for the role and the months of voice training he did to capture the soft-spoken nature of a man who was so brutal in the ring he could knock out opponents in 19 seconds. That’s how Kerr got the nickname “The Smashing Machine,” also the title of the 2002 HBO documentary that inspired Johnson to ask Safdie to collaborate on this scripted movie.
The first time Kerr saw Johnson in full makeup, he says he was completely caught by surprise. The two-time UFC champ — and as of 2025, a UFC Hall of Famer — had come to Vancouver to check out a day of filming when “DJ,” as Johnson is known to friends, tapped him on the shoulder in full prostheses and the wig. “I turn around and it was like, ‘Holy s—!'” Kerr says, laughing over Zoom. “I cussed at him for a few minutes and then I just settled into the shock of seeing my reflection.”
Emily Blunt, a good friend of Johnson’s who plays Kerr’s girlfriend Dawn — with whom he’s in a volatile, toxic relationship — called the effect “spooky.” “It was one of the most extraordinary things … seeing him completely disappear,” she said at the Cannes Film Festival in May. “I remember when he walked in as Mark for the first time, it changed the air in the room. It was like everyone parted. Everyone went quiet. I’m sure it sucked for you,” she said, turning to Johnson and laughing, “but it was really extraordinary.”
There is, of course, talk of Oscars. No one of Johnson’s box office stature spends a year transforming himself for a modestly budgeted movie (it cost a rumored $50 million, which would make it one of A24’s most expensive films ever, but it’s small for a movie starring the Rock) without some greater ambition to demonstrate range or, as he’s said in multiple interviews, work out some demons from his wrestling family’s past.
The Oscar talk isn’t just for Johnson, but also for the master makeup artist Safdie managed to lure in: Kazu Hiro (née Kazuhiro Tsuji), a Japanese immigrant with a side career sculpting eerily lifelike busts of historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Seemingly always on the verge of retirement, Hiro has a reputation in the movie industry as the prostheses guy you have to get.
Gary Oldman told Vulture in 2017 that his taking the role of Winston Churchill in “The Darkest Hour” was partially contingent on Hiro joining the movie, saying, “One of the reasons I wanted Kazu was he was really one of the only people on the planet who could pull it off.” Prostheses were going to be key to achieving Churchill’s sagging jowls because Oldman, 59 at the time, refused to endanger his health by gaining weight for the role. The actor actually had to coax Hiro back into the game, because he’d quit the movie industry to concentrate on his visual art for mental health reasons. The makeup maestro won the Oscar that year.
Hiro’s also known as the guy who turned Tim Roth into a military-leader chimpanzee in 2001’s “Planet of the Apes”; helped Brad Pitt reverse-age in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”; created the creature design for the Amphibian Man in “The Shape of Water”; helped Joseph Gordon-Levitt age into Bruce Willis in “Looper”; and who turned Charlize Theron into Megyn Kelly for “Bombshell.” That last one earned him his second Oscar.
Safdie knew of Hiro by reputation but really took note of his work watching “Maestro,” in which Bradley Cooper plays Leonard Bernstein over 30 years of his life, with a large, and quite controversial, prosthetic nose. (Bernstein’s children said they loved it, and thought their dad would, too; “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose,” they said in 2024.) Safdie was marveling at something different, though. “It was the age of the skin,” he tells me. “I didn’t know how it was possible to have that happen to Bradley Cooper … It looked like a magic trick. You know, his sleeves are rolled up and you could see, like, old man’s skin. And I was just like, ‘This is remarkable.'”
Once he’d settled on the idea of having Hiro in the job, Safdie couldn’t imagine doing the movie with anyone else. “There is a certain level of realism that he brings to it that is shocking,” the director says. “He is able to a transform people that are very recognizable, but he’s also able to do it in a way that’s very nuanced and special.”
Hiro says he signed on because “special effects makeup is my passion and art is my passion and I really like the human face … so any biopic or any character makeup, I want to do it, because that’s why I started this job.” Self-taught, Hiro became obsessed with movie makeup as a 13-year-old in Kyoto, Japan, and began corresponding with “Exorcist” and “Amadeus” makeup artist Dick Smith. When Hiro finally moved to L.A., a Japanese friend helped him land his first job on “Men in Black,” but he’s always been drawn more to a kind of hyperrealism that verges on the surreal.
Over many conversations for “The Smashing Machine,” Safdie says, he learned that Hiro is obsessed with how prostheses move with the human face and body. “I’ve always admired your eyebrows,” he told Safdie. Then he used the director as inspiration for Johnson’s eyebrows in the movie.
The first part of the process was making 3D scans of both Kerr and Johnson’s faces. “They did a full body scan and they did a specific digital scan of my face,” Kerr says. “I mean, I stepped into a trailer that had, I don’t know, a thousand cameras in it — this state-of-the-art thing.”
Then Hiro made two sculptures, one that looked exactly like Kerr and one that was more of a hybrid. They decided to go with the more subtle option because, Hiro says, “it really gives you the look of Mark Kerr, but still Dwayne — kind of his soul showing through.” Too many prostheses, they worried, would mute Johnson’s emotional expressions.
Also, it was way more practical for a movie filled with fighting, in which Safdie and Johnson were both vehemently opposed to using a stunt double. The more coverage on Johnson’s face, the more chances things could go wrong every time he got punched, and the more time it would take to fix. Plus, he’d be sweating all the time. “Sweat is kind of enemy for the prosthetic because it just starts to fall apart,” Hiro says.
He sculpted an exact replica of Kerr’s cauliflower ear, which the fighter tells me is “hard as a rock,” the result of cartilage being damaged during fights and blood rushing to the area to attempt to repair it. The nose is different — pointier, with more bumps — and the eyebrows are more prominent. Johnson, 53, is playing Kerr at 29 and beyond, so he had to have thick curly black hair that actually looked like it was growing out of his head — “Which was fun for me,” said Johnson, rubbing his trademark bald skull at the New York screening. Hiro worked with his collaborator of 25 years, Diana Choi, to make sure the wig framed Johnson’s face just right. Then they made even more prostheses to account for the many times his face would be gashed or bruised from a fight, plus one for a moment when Kerr injects his arm with pain killers, which required hiding a device within fake flesh so Johnson could push in saline and then pull back the plunger so the syringe fills with blood.
To allow Johnson to still have expression in his eyes, Hiro made a cavity within the prostheses so they’d move more delicately with his muscle. “So, when he blinks, it will work with his eye movement, because if I didn’t do that, he cannot close his eye totally,” Hiro says. The team also covered up Johnson’s many tattoos and replaced them with Kerr’s tattoos and scars, which was particularly precarious work given how often that makeup would rub off with all the sweating and grappling. Throughout it all, Hiro says, Johnson was polite and respectful: “He’s the most patient person I’ve ever worked with.”
Safdie adds: “Most importantly, I said to Dwayne, ‘When you’re looking at me, how do you feel?’ And he said, ‘I feel like myself,’ which meant he wasn’t thinking about everything that was on him.”
Once a movie starts, half the job is the initial application, and the other half is making it stick. Hiro says he’s learned over the years that everyone sweats differently and you have to study it to get the prostheses to stay on. Everyone sweats differently, from different areas of their face and body, and everyone’s sweat has its unique chemistry, turning makeup artistry into a minute-by-minute science experiment.
“I was really nervous because everybody told me this is the moment he gets sweaty, the moment somebody touches him, it’s going to fall off,” Safdie says. When he told Hiro he didn’t want to use computer graphics, the makeup artist did nothing to reassure him, and said that — obviously — the prostheses were going to fall off.
“But secretly, behind the scenes, he was working on a mixture of glue that he knew was going to stay on,” Safdie says. “And it was remarkable because [Dwayne] is sweating, hands on his face and it never budges.” They had one moment when Johnson was crying and snot got introduced where they had to do a reset, but for the most part it all hung on because of Hiro’s miraculous adhesive mixture.
“I just thought it was so amazing that [Kazu] held that back,” Safdie says. “He’s like, ‘If I had told you it wasn’t going to fall off, then when it fell off, you would have been upset.’ And I appreciate that because now I have this wonder of the whole thing.”
For Hiro, the most rewarding part was when Kerr’s son saw the film in New York three months ago. “Every time a family member sees their family member [in the movie] that’s rewarding for me because they know you so well.”
As Kerr tells it, his son had flown from California to New York for the screening and called his dad from the lobby, with Johnson and Blunt standing nearby. “He’s like, ‘Dad, he looks like you, his hand gestures are like you, he even walks like you!'” Kerr tells me. “And then there’s this big pause — and this is what floored me. He goes, ‘He’s got your heart, too.'”
Kerr chokes up as he tells the story. “Dude, that just totally broke me down.”
