Russell Crowe, Daniel MacPherson and Amy Shark star in bruising MMA drama

Daniel MacPherson is no stranger to the idea of ​​suffering for his art. “I love challenges, I thrive on challenges,” he says. “My career has been built on saying yes to things I probably shouldn’t have done, throwing everything to hell, and seeing what happens.”

He jumped from helicopters into leech-infested forests CounterattackHe rubbed elbows with a bunch of jockeys at Flemington Cup and jumped on a runaway stagecoach as a forest ranger Wild Boys.

But do MonsterA. RockyThe film, which tells the story of a washed-up MMA fighter who comes out of retirement to reach the world championship one last time, took the fight to a whole new level.

“I was supposed to play against Russell Crowe, I was supposed to fight like this [Australian-born UFC featherweight champion] “Alex Volkanovski and I had to look as good as Chris Hemsworth without my shirt on in eight weeks on an independent film budget.”

He also had to train on and off for two years before filming began in order to succeed professionally in one of the most brutal sports on the planet. And when the cameras finally started rolling, he had to endure a professional punching him in the face.

To be fair, he admits that making such violent contact from his on-camera opponent Bren Foster, a black belt in four different martial arts, wasn’t part of the plan.

“It was my fault,” says MacPherson, who makes his big screen debut in a decidedly gentler manner. neighborsHe portrayed Joel Samuels for five years, starting in 1998. “I was supposed to raise my hands, but I didn’t. What’s the first rule of fighting? Always protect yourself. It was all my fault.”

The fight scenes were choreographed by Foster, and according to MacPherson, Foster was “perfect to the millimeter”. The lead actor is not like that. “I had to put my hands down somewhere, but I didn’t and I felt a sharp crack.”

The punch broke his nose. But MacPherson did not think for a moment of throwing in the towel. “I said, ‘Oh, hold on. I might need a second,'” he told the crew. “My eyes watered, I took a spin around the octagon [the fighting cage]and I jumped back in. ‘Okay, let’s go.’ I really won’t make this mistake twice.

This wasn’t the only injury he suffered. While the film’s final fight scenes were shot in a real MMA stadium (Bangkok’s Impact Arena), “I had a broken nose, a torn adductor. [groin muscle] “I had broken my pelvis and they had to cover my black eyes to put in fake black eyes and fake prosthetics.”

Inside MonsterMacPherson plays Patton James. We meet him as he’s about to step into the ring for the championship match. A crippling suspicion has developed and he vomits in the locker room. Step into the role of Russell Crowe’s trainer, Sammy, with one of the most exciting motivational speeches you’ll ever see.

As opening scenes go, it’s a knockout.

The action fast forwards a decade, and a noticeably less ripped Patton is now working as a fisherman on a deep-sea trawler, earning little—or no pay—depending on the catch and the whims of his A-hole boat captain, and struggling to keep his family afloat.

Still, he takes his responsibilities seriously; He wants to be a good husband to Luciana (Kelly Gale), support her as she finishes her degree, and be a good father to their son. Fighting would offer a big payday and make all of this much easier, but he has promised Luciana he will not return to the ring because it is too dangerous. Of course, this is a promise he will break eventually.

Monster (called The Monster Inside Me – after the Johnny Cash song featured in the closing credits of Russell Crowe and his band Indoor Garden Party – may not win an originality award until a certain Netflix series comes along starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys. But a few might like it for the unflinching flesh-and-blood realism of the fight scenes.

MacPherson was working on war movie Bad Country American David Frigerio, the writer of the film, said that he has another project with Crowe, Liam Hemsworth and his brother Luke that could be interesting on the Gold Coast in 2022.

“He gave me the script [for Beast] “I’ve watched you and Russell work for the last two weeks, and you would be a perfect fit for the characters I have in this MMA movie,” MacPherson recalls. “I read the script and it was amazing, except it was set in Buffalo, New York, and I didn’t know the first thing about what it was like to work in a steel mill in Buffalo, New York.”

“Then Tyler Atkins came on board as director, and Tyler didn’t know much about what life was like in Buffalo, New York. But we knew a lot about growing up in places like Newcastle and Wollongong.”

But the winner of the first season was Atkins Amazing Race AustraliaHe made his feature film debut with the semi-autobiographical surf movie. Bosch and Rockit 2022 found a lot to like about the script, but also saw its shortcomings.

“I initially turned it down a few times because it was set in America, and obviously stories like this had happened before,” he says.

The breakthrough came after speaking to Luke Hemsworth, whom she calls “one of my dear friends” (he was the adult lead in the film). Bosch and Rockit and has a small role Monster) about “certain issues” with the story. “And he told me: ‘You’re never going to get a script that you absolutely love, but if you can see things that you like as a filmmaker, you can start injecting them.’ And that was a really beautiful moment for me.”

With MacPherson’s involvement, Atkins began reworking the story and moved the action to Kembla Harbour. And once Crowe committed, the Oscar winner gave his own permission to the script (enough to earn co-writing credit).

Atkins infused the story with not only a strong sense of Australianness, but also themes he was passionate about. “I’m pro-relationship, pro-family, pro-forgiveness, and pro-men pursuing their dreams… I worked really hard to shape a story that could show true masculinity.”

In this age of the so-called manosphere, Atkins knows that any talk of masculinity can be problematic. “This is a slippery slope,” he says. “But we must be able to have informed discussions about what a man is.

“To me, masculinity is not a man who can break down the wall,” he continues. “Masculinity is a man who can have his heart broken, rebuild, and come back stronger and better. There’s a huge push in this world about toxic masculinity, but no one says anything about good male role models. And I really wanted to show the world – and Dan was a big part of that – what a real man is.”

“A man is a man who can grow up and live an honest life, who doesn’t give a fuck about people, who is a responsible father and a great husband who works hard. I’m talking about men who are heart-centered, understand emotions, have emotional intelligence and show up.”

And know how to throw a punch when necessary.

Atkins, who lives in Byron Bay with his wife and daughters, is a gentle, kind and spiritual soul. But he was drawn to the world of warriors because “they are men who can protect communities, protect women, and protect children from things that might come to their town or village; they can step forward and say ‘no, this is wrong’.”

He says he’s met a lot of fighters and the best of them “are not the ones who are out there tearing people apart. They’re actually very beautiful people. It’s a meditation, and they’re very down-to-earth people. If push comes to shove, they’ll stand up and protect people. To me, that’s the real, real man. He doesn’t live there, but if he needs to, he goes there, then he becomes vulnerable and centered again and can still have those” heartfelt conversations that men need to learn how to have.

Perhaps this much burden can be placed on a fight movie. There were also times when the weight became almost unbearable for Atkins.

“Movies have their own soul, and you have to follow what the movie wants,” he says. “This movie was about an underdog who won a world championship, and it gave us our own world championship. It warmed our hearts.”

The night after the first block of filming was completed – two weeks in Sydney with Crowe, five weeks off before flying to Thailand for the big fight scenes – Atkins was left unconscious in his hotel room. He experienced a paralyzing dizziness that he had never experienced before in his life.

“I couldn’t stand up. My whole world was spinning like a washing machine. I vomited everywhere. I fell. My wife had to take me to the hospital.”

For a while, he thought he needed to step away from the movie he had been working on for four years. “When you have vertigo you can’t really think,” he says. “I couldn’t walk straight, I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t remember anything. I couldn’t even think. But the day I left for Thailand was the day, four weeks later, that the dizziness disappeared.”

Money was also an issue; the film was started three times, but was halted due to financing problems.

On the third attempt, a week into shooting, an investor pulled out, meaning several million dollars had to be found overnight (surprisingly, it was). “This happens in almost every movie,” he says. “As a director, you have to be able to adapt.”

But the stop-start wasn’t all bad for MacPherson. “The film gods did me a favor,” he says with a laugh. “When we first got ready to shoot (in mid-2023), I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t have the build, the weight, or the technical ability to portray a monster fighter and everything he needed.”

“I was the weakest, most dehydrated, most broken person I had ever been,” he says, when the cameras rolled in late 2024.

He takes pride in the physical work he does, but he also takes pride in his performance more broadly. “There is a constant balance between vanity, aesthetics and functionality, and we walked that line,” he says. “We needed to make it technically proficient and engaging, as well as extremely compelling story-wise. And we needed to elevate it to the realm of cinematic entertainment.”

As with Atkins, MacPherson sees a lot of content beneath the genre’s shell.

“I liked that Patton was a really old-school, conventionally moral guy, make no mistake,” he says. “His moral compass was rock solid and his view of the world was right-wrong, good-bad. I wanted to explore that on screen because that’s maybe potentially a dying part of masculinity.”

As a man in his mid-40s who has experienced parenthood, divorce, and caring for his own parents, MacPherson says, “I also found it resonated with a man who had lost his sense of purpose and identity under the weight of the responsibility that came at that time in his life.”

In Patton, he saw a man who stood by his responsibilities and moral code while trying to rediscover his own identity.

“Once I unlocked Patton James and that part of the story,” he says, “the depth and meaning and my own purpose of what I wanted to do in the film really emerged.

“It tested me and challenged me in every aspect of my skills,” he adds, a role he has been with since 2022. “This is by far the performance I’m most proud of in my career.”

Monster It is released in cinemas from 23 April and on Stan from 26 May.

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