The Iron Claw isn’t just a biopic about the tragic Von Erich brothers, who met difficult fates while striving for success as professional wrestlers in the 1980s and 1990s. The new A24 film is also a study in toxic families, a topic director Sean Durkin thinks is under-explored — “which is part of why I’m so drawn to it,” he tells Consequence.
Starring Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, and Harris Dickinson as three of the Von Erich brothers, Durkin calls the Iron Claw ensemble “a dream cast — I’ve wanted to work with all of them for a long time. So it was identifying the core characteristic I was looking for and matching that to the right actor, starting with Zac and then building from there.”
Efron plays Kevin Von Erich, the oldest living brother of the clan and the key living witness to the story. There was no past project of Efron’s that inspired Durkin’s interest in casting him, though — says Durkin, “I’ve just always loved what he does, and I love the versatility that he has. And he has always got this sort of sweetness in his presence. I’m a big fan of his and have been for years, so I always wondered how it would feel, to put him into one of my worlds.”
The Iron Claw doesn’t lean on one single source of information for its source material: Instead, Durkin drew his portrait from in-depth research, including articles and interviews. When it came to the real-life Kevin, Durkin initially wanted to maintain a bit of distance, because “I was coming to this as a fan who loved him and loved the family, so I wanted to keep some space so that I could make tough decisions and not have to factor in those emotions.”
However, Durkin adds, “once I knew the movie I was making, I reached out, and he’s just been an incredible ally. He and his family, I’ve become quite close to them.”
Durkin knows that this is a film that will reach two audiences — wrestling fans intimately familiar with the tragedies of the Von Erich family, and those with no prior knowledge of the subject matter — who won’t be bothered, for instance, by the script not including youngest brother Chris Von Erich.
The Iron Claw (A24)
“It’s a really interesting challenge,” he says. “I’m a wrestling fan, so I want to deliver something that wrestling fans can thoroughly enjoy, and find the Easter eggs in, and bask in the experience of that time and place. But I also love people coming to it who know nothing about wrestling, who never really thought about wrestling, and can enjoy it as a family drama and a unique world to go into. So it was a constant balance of thinking about the details and what to include — what’s too much in the wrestling weeds, and what’s just enough.”
One of the film’s biggest strengths, in fact, is the way it draws out certain reveals so that even audience members aware of the facts might still be shocked. “It’s the kind of thing I was aware in building the rhythm of a sequence — how, even if you know it’s coming, even if you know the story and you know the details, they’re being revealed in a way that is shocking, gripping and packing the right emotional punch.”
Rather than play with the structure of that story, Durkin decided to let it unfold chronologically, because “the linear unfolding of the events really felt like the right way to go” — doing so allowed the narrative to build up to the Von Erichs at their peak, before tackling “the way it sort of falls apart and then Kevin’s survival. It always felt like the right way to unfold the story. There’s so much happening that the simplest way was the best way forward.”
Adds Durkin, “This story is so huge and epic and sort of unthinkable, the amount of things that happened to them — when I first looked at the timeline that I had assembled through research, it was very clear that we were looking at this epic Greek tragedy, but with this incredible survival story at the core. And so the challenge really was, how do I chip away at that to fit something into a two-hour film? That was really the challenge, because there was just so much to choose from.”
Making the film meant recreating the Dallas Sportatorium, the arena that launched the Von Erichs’ careers, and Durkin says working on those moments was “like a childhood dream come true.” Specifically, he fell in love with the energy of the Sportatorium — “it was a very specific place and feel.”
Capturing the spirit of the Sportatorium, it turns out, also meant recreating some of wrestling’s earliest days as a televised event. “WrestleMania is a big refined show, and the funny thing is, [World Class Championship Wrestling, the Von Erichs’ professional wrestling promotion] was the beginning of that show,” Durkin says. “It was presented on TV in ways that no other show before it had been, so in some ways it’s the beginning of what wrestling has become, but in its raw early form. There’s a simplicity to it that I just really love and honestly miss about wrestling. The spectacle kind of takes over now, but I miss that intimate small arena feel.”
How does Durkin define that small arena feel? “It feels closer — a bit less shiny, a bit more real maybe.”
One of those nods to the wrestling fans in the audience is Aaron Dean Eisenberg as a young Ric Flair, one of wrestling’s most ostentatious figures, who makes a quick appearance at a key point in the drama to say, in Durkin’s words, “some very poignant things about wrestling and masculinity.” Durkin wanted to acknowledge how “Ric Flair really changed performance in wrestling,” while also offer a bit of comedic relief during one of the film’s darkest periods: “I think that, for me, was always the search in the movie — how to have that humor say something, and also just enjoy the show of it. Because that’s what wrestling is. It’s all of those things.”
For, while his wrestling fandom inspired his initial interest in the story, Durkin says “the main thing” that drew him to The Iron Claw was “the emotional impact of the pain. At the time, there was zero protection for these guys, and they were out there wrestling with no break, and they had to just constantly sacrifice themselves. And they were supposed to just keep doing it, because it’s what men did — it was like this false notion of a man being tough. My whole reason for being drawn to the story is to explore how harmful that notion is.”
At the same time, he says that exploring this world only added to his appreciation for the sport: “I mean, I’ve always had a lot of respect for wrestling, but you can’t get that close to it and not respect it even more — its grueling nature, its artistry, its performance. It mixes so many aspects of sports, entertainment, and art — it’s really an incredible thing.”
Durkin’s previous two dramas, Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest, have no connection to the world of wrestling, but for him, “there’s a real through line here between the three films all looking at families and questioning why we believe what we believe — and what is family. How do you break from the mold of your own family? I wouldn’t rule out continuing to explore that.”
And, much like wrestling wasn’t a subject matter that people might have anticipated him exploring, “I’m really interested in a huge variety of things — I could see myself exploring other worlds that were unexpected.”
The Iron Claw arrives in theaters on Friday, December 22nd.