The day before the premiere of The Smashing Machine at the Venice Film Festival earlier this week, former mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr describes his emotional state as “vibrational.” It’s tough to pin down where jet lag ends and nerves begin, but not long before audiences will see Dwayne Johnson act out his life story for the first time, the 56-year-old is just trying to roll with the absurdity of the moment. Keeping a clear head has been at the top of his agenda for some time now: the first thing he told me, a week earlier over Zoom, was that he was “trying to try to wrap my head around what's in front of me.” Entrusting your story to someone else and then putting it out there for public consumption is no small thing, even when you’ve lived out much of that story in the public

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