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Jon Bernthal Lost 30 Pounds Learning to Play Tennis for ‘King Richard’ Role

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Jon Bernthal Lost 30 Pounds Learning to Play Tennis for ‘King Richard’ Role

Jon Bernthal often plays the tough guy. But when he got the script for Warner Bros.’ King Richard, about Richard Williams and his quest to make his daughters Serena and Venus the best tennis players in the world, Bernthal knew he wanted to be a part of it. Bernthal fought hard to play Rick Macci, the legendary tennis coach of the Williams sisters, and came to appreciate Macci’s sincere love for the game and the Williams family, as well as Macci’s coaching method.

Bernthal and Macci spoke to THR about their collaboration to accurately portray Macci on the big screen, how Bernthal learned to play tennis for the role and what advice Macci gave Bernthal to get inside his mind.

Rick, what was your reaction to hearing that this movie was in the works?

RICK MACCI Back in the day, Richard always would say some wild things. Early on, before [Venus and Serena] were even anything, he always told me not only how good they would become, but that they were probably going to do a movie about the kids someday. He even said, “Someday, Rick, they’re going to make a movie about me.” I think telling this story through the eyes of Richard, and exactly how this played out … people are blown away. You can’t make this stuff up. He and I were on a mission, and I love the guy to death.

Jon, what drew you to the project and to the role of Rick?

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JON BERNTHAL So much. I fought for this. They didn’t see me for it initially. And I really, really wanted to do it. What’s so beautiful about telling this story is that everybody has some knowledge of [them] — like you said, they’re perhaps the biggest sports icons alive right now. I think it’s so much better to not have it be this highlight film of Grand Slams and Wimbledon. The palpability of how impossible this dream was is really highlighted by telling the story at this time. The script blew me away. I’m an ex-athlete, I’m raising young athletes, and I thought that this story really explored the full spectrum of youth sports and how toxic it can be, all the way to how sublimely beautiful it can be. As far as Rick goes, some of the coaches in my life have had such an unbelievable impact on who I am as a man, as an artist, as a father, as a husband. So much of the time, coaches in movies are portrayed as these taskmasters or complete hard-asses. The thing that I was just really taken with about the way Rick was portrayed in the script, and then everything that I’ve heard about him, it’s just that he’s got this pure, unadulterated love for the game. And that he coaches with joy and with passion. You know, Serena told me that her time playing for you, Rick, was the most fun time in her life. It’s the first thing she said.

MACCI Trust me, she’s a character.

BERNTHAL But so are you! She said, “He made everything fun, everything was a game, everything was a contest.” I know [from] raising my own kids who are athletes themselves, keeping it fun, keeping it enjoyable, is so important, and especially when you’re dealing with the level that you are when it’s such high pressure. I love that there’s such an unbelievable lesson there. In studying you and reading your books and looking at your interviews, I love the way that everything is a game. It’s so tenacious, it’s so fun, you do it with so much love and passion. I also really felt that at the end of the day, you just really are a part of that family. You love those young women like they were your own.

Rick Macci with Venus and Richard Williams in 1992.
Ken Levine/Allsport/ Getty Images

Rick, how much input did you have in who was going to portray you?

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MACCI There were so many people who told me they wanted to play me — it sounds weird. But Jon ended up the leader in the clubhouse. They told me when I went out to California that he wasn’t first on their list, but like anything in life, sometimes when you have to fight harder, you end up winning the thing.

How did you guys collaborate?

MACCI Right off the bat, we talked a handful of times on the phone. I have a lot of stuff all over the internet, videos, and there’s some books. Jon said it best: I think talking to people, the many people that I coached … you get the feel of how I was. I’ve got to mention Richard. This guy, even when I went to Compton, he turned on a [camera]. I thought I was in a deposition with this guy. This guy grilled me. He videotaped everything. You couldn’t ask for a better treasure trove of what happened. [The] only thing that was different, Jon had this, like, shrubbery on his face. I had this tight little piece of AstroTurf that took me 30 years to grow. So other than the mustache, I love the guy. You hit it out of the park.

BERNTHAL It was such a joy for me to channel you, man. I believe in the way that you conduct your life. It was a joy for me to play such a joyous person. I played sports my whole life. I did not know much about tennis when this thing started. But I am a firm believer that if you’re going to do a sports movie, you’ve got to get the sport right. I find it enormously disrespectful when films don’t do that. I was enormously grateful to the producers to give me the infrastructure to really learn the game of tennis. I trained at an academy out here in Ojai for three hours a day. I lost 30 pounds. I would learn the game of tennis, but then I also got to learn how to coach. I worked with a top 50 junior nationals player named Kamea Medora, who was awesome, and I trained her in character. To be able to do those drills and be able to coach in character, I felt that then stepping in, I was in a great place. The other thing is, Rick — I mean, besides the unbelievable sexiness and beauty of that mustache, and your overall thing you’ve got going on — you have one of the most unique voices and dialects and speech patterns of anyone I’ve ever heard. That was one thing I really wanted to get right … but the thing that I felt like I was most interested in was your heart. Your heart, loving these two young women, loving this family, wanting to be a part of this mission. And [having production] shut down for six months [during the pandemic] gave me six more months to keep on preparing, keep on playing, keep on training.

What’s one piece of advice Rick gave you?

BERNTHAL That you can be tough, and you can be tenacious, and you can be an animal, and you can do it with a smile. A lot of people have talked to me about how this is a different kind of role for me, that I’m usually playing these tough guys. I think Rick Macci’s enormously tough! He’s just this unbelievably strong figure, and he does it with a pure, unadulterated love and passion.

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MACCI This is why Jon won the sweepstakes, and he got to play me. I couldn’t have said that any better. See, the art of coaching, there’s not a wrong way or right way, there’s a better way. There’s an art to this thing. I’ve been on the court since age 22, probably [longer] than anybody in the world. And then you’ve got to deal with the parents. … People say, “Why did I do this?” Why did I take the chance? To me, there was no chance. I believed in myself. I knew what I could do. But I saw something in these two little girls that I haven’t seen my whole life. I saw a rage inside these two little kids to get to the ball. And they transcend the sport. There wasn’t any risk. The only way I lose is if I can’t deal with Richard, but I could deal with Richard. And he knew that I was all in. When you get that power, and you have the goods, and Venus and Serena, the rest is history.

Lazy loaded image

Will Smith as Richard Williams in King Richard, in a scene with Jon Bernthal’s Rick Macci.
Warner Bros.

BERNTHAL One of the things that Rick was getting at that I found really interesting is, these are two men who are very used to doing things their way. What I really love is to play interesting, complicated and fascinating characters and put them in very interesting, fascinating and complicated situations. So there is this art about, I’m here to do my job, to train these kids, to make them the best that they can be. And now you’ve got to deal with this whole other thing, which is Richard Williams, and I think a lot lesser men would have sort of succumbed to that.

MACCI You can see in the movie how stubborn Richard was. One quick story: They go from Compton, from that house you see, to that five-star resort-like house [in West Palm Beach, Florida] that’s like the Taj Mahal, and about 10 days into it, he calls me up at 11 o’clock at night. And Richard goes, “Hey, Rick, you got to get over here. Someone’s trying to kill me.” I go, “Richard, wait a minute. If I come over, they’re going to kill me, too.” He started laughing. I go, “Richard, it’s probably security. Don’t worry about it.” He goes, “Rick, you’ve got to get over here.” So I said, “OK, Richard, I’ll get dressed. I’ll be over in 15 minutes.” He goes, “Rick, don’t worry about it. I’m just kidding. I just wanted to see how much you cared about our family.” Like Jon said, it takes a certain guy to take a punch, and to be able to just let it roll off your back. And honestly, the best vacation I ever had in my life was in Compton, California, believe it or not.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

This story first appeared in a January stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

Hitting the three-quarter-century mark usually means a retirement home, a nursing facility, or if you’re lucky to be blessed with relatively good health and savings to match, living in a gated community in Arizona or Florida.

For Sylvester Stallone, however, it means something else entirely: starring in the first superhero-centered film of his decades-long career in the much-delayed Samaritan. Unfortunately for Stallone and the audience on the other side of the screen, the derivative, turgid, forgettable results won’t get mentioned in a career retrospective, let alone among the ever-expanding list of must-see entries in a genre already well past its peak.

For Stallone, however, it’s better late than never when it involves the superhero genre. Maybe in getting a taste of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) with his walk-on role in the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel several years ago, Stallone thought anything Marvel can do, I can do even better (or just as good in the nebulous definition of the word).

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The property Stallone and his team found for him, Samaritan, a little-known graphic novel released by a small, almost negligible, publisher, certainly takes advantage of Stallone’s brute-force physicality and his often underrated talent for near-monosyllabic brooding (e.g., the Rambo series), but too often gives him to little do or say as the lone super-powered survivor, the so-called “Samaritan” of the title, of a lifelong rivalry with his brother, “Nemesis.” Two brothers entered a fire-ravaged building and while both were presumed dead, one brother did survive (Stallone’s Joe Smith, a garbageman by day, an appliance repairman by night).

In the Granite City of screenwriter Bragi F. Schut (Escape Room, Season of the Witch), the United States, and presumably the rest of the world, teeters on economic and political collapse, with a recession spiraling into a depression, steady gigs difficult, if not impossible, to obtain, and the city’s neighborhoods rocked by crime and violence. No one’s safe, not even 13-year-old Sam (Javon Walker), Joe’s neighbor.

When he’s not dodging bullies connected to a gang, he’s falling under the undue influence of Cyrus (Pilou Asbæk), a low-rent gang leader with an outsized ego and the conviction that he and only he can take on Nemesis’s mantle and along with that mantle, a hammer “forged in hate,” to orchestrate a Bane-like plan to plunge the city into chaos and become a wealthy power-broker in the process.

Schut’s woefully underwritten script takes a clumsy, haphazard approach to world-building, relying on a two-minute animated sequence to open Samaritan while a naive, worshipful Sam narrates Samaritan and Nemesis’s supposedly tragic, Cain and Abel-inspired backstory. Schut and director Julius Avery (Overlord) clumsily attempt to contrast Sam’s childish belief in messiah-like, superheroic saviors stepping in to save humanity from itself and its own worst excesses, but following that path leads to authoritarianism and fascism (ideas better, more thoroughly explored in Watchmen and The Boys).

While Sam continues to think otherwise, Stallone’s superhero, 25 years past his last, fatal encounter with his presumably deceased brother, obviously believes superheroes are the problem and not the solution (a somewhat reasonable position), but as Samaritan tracks Joe and Sam’s friendship, Sam giving Joe the son he never had, Joe giving Sam the father he lost to street violence well before the film’s opening scene, it gets closer and closer to embracing, if not outright endorsing Sam’s power fantasies, right through a literally and figuratively explosive ending. Might, as always, wins regardless of how righteous or justified the underlying action.

It’s what superhero audiences want, apparently, and what Samaritan uncritically delivers via a woefully under-rendered finale involving not just unconvincing CGI fire effects, but a videogame cut-scene quality Stallone in a late-film flashback sequence that’s meant to be subversively revelatory, but will instead lead to unintentional laughter for anyone who’s managed to sit the entirety of Samaritan’s one-hour and 40-minute running time.

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Samaritan is now streaming worldwide on Prime Video.

Samaritan

Cast
  • Sylvester Stallone
  • Javon ‘Wanna’ Walton
  • Pilou Asbæk

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Matt Shakman Is In Talks To Direct ‘Fantastic Four’

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According to a new report, Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct the upcoming MCU project, Fantastic Four. Marvel Studios has been very hush-hush regarding Fantastic Four to the point where no official announcements have been made other than the film’s release date. No casting news or literally anything other than rumors has been released regarding the project. We know that Fantastic Four is slated for release on November 8th, 2024, and will be a part of Marvel’s Phase 6. There are also rumors that the cast of the new Fantastic Four will be announced at the D23 Expo on September 9th.

Fantastic Four is still over two years from release, and we assume we will hear more news about the project in the coming months. However, the idea of the Fantastic Four has already been introduced into the MCU. John Krasinski played Reed Richards aka Mr. Fantastic in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The cameo was a huge deal for fans who have been waiting a long time for the Fantastic Four to enter the MCU. When Disney acquired Twenty Century Fox in 2019 we assumed that the Fox Marvel characters would eventually make their way into the MCU. It’s been 3 years and we already have had an X-Men and Fantastic Four cameo – even if they were from another universe.

Deadline is reporting that Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct Fantastic Four. Shakman served as the director for Wandavision and has had an extensive career. He directed two episodes of Game of Thrones and an episode of The Boys, and he had a long stint on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There is nothing official yet, but Deadline’s sources say that Shakman is currently in talks for the job and things are headed in the right direction.

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To be honest, I was a bit more excited when Jon Watts was set to direct. I’m sure Shakman is a good director, but Watts proved he could handle a tentpole superhero film with Spider-Man: Homecoming. Wandavision was good, but Watts’ style would have been perfect for Fantastic Four. The film is probably one of the most anticipated films in Marvel’s upcoming slate films and they need to find the best person they can to direct. Is that Matt Shakman? It could be, but whoever takes the job must realize that Marvel has a lot riding on this movie. The other Fantastic Four films were awful and fans deserve better. Hopefully, Marvel knocks it out of the park as they usually do. You can see for yourself when Fantastic Four hits theaters on November 8th, 2024.

Film Synopsis: One of Marvel’s most iconic families makes it to the big screen: the Fantastic Four.

Source: Deadline

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Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase Star in ‘Zombie Town’ Mystery Teen Romancer (Exclusive)

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Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase have entered Zombie Town, a mystery teen romancer based on author R.L. Stine’s book of the same name.

The indie, now shooting in Ontario, also stars Henry Czerny and co-teen leads Marlon Kazadi and Madi Monroe. The ensemble cast includes Scott Thompson and Bruce McCulloch of the Canadian comedy show Kids in the Hall.

Canadian animator Peter Lepeniotis will direct Zombie Town. Stine’s kid’s book sees a quiet town upended when 12-year-old Mike and his friend, Karen, see a horror movie called Zombie Town and unexpectedly see the title characters leap off the screen and chase them through the theater.

Zombie Town will premiere in U.S. theaters before streaming on Hulu and then ABC Australia in 2023.

“We are delighted to bring the pages of R.L. Stine’s Zombie Town to the screen and equally thrilled to be working with such an exceptional cast and crew on this production. A three-time Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award winner with book sales of over $500 million, R.L. Stine has a phenomenal track record of crafting stories that engage and entertain audiences,” John Gillespie, Trimuse Entertainment founder and executive producer, said in a statement.

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Executive producers are Trimuse Entertainment, Toonz Media Group, Lookout Entertainment, Viva Pictures and Sons of Anarchy actor Kim Coates.  

Paco Alvarez and Mark Holdom of Trimuse negotiated the deal to acquire the rights to Stine’s Zombie Town book.

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