‘The Iron Claw’ Stunt Coordinator on Zac Efron’s Training and Using ‘High School Musical’ Dance Experience to Teach Him Wrestling

For Zac Efron, A24‘s The Iron Claw was the most challenging project in a career of more than two decades, but “in the best ways possible.”

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the year’s most talked-about scripts continues with The Iron Claw, which tells the saga of the wrestling Von Erich family in two hours.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor Holt McCallany is the quintessential “that guy” actor, with more than 80 film and TV credits to his name. Now he’s stepping into the spotlight as the legendary wrestling family patriarch Fritz Von Erich in Sean Durkin’s harrowing sports drama “The Iron Claw.” McCallany’s first acting attempt came at 14, after he ran away from his New York home and headed to Hollywood with no contacts or strategy. He wound up working at a screwdriver factory in Gardena before his parents — Tony Award-winning producer Michael McAloney and actress and singer Julie Wilson — tracked him down and shipped him to a boarding school in Ireland.

Zac Efron is sharing some “firsts.”

Carrie Bernans was left critically injured after a hit-and-run in New York City.

Vanessa Hudgens and her husband, Cole Tucker’s, first Christmas as newlyweds, and she shared an adorable selfie, smiling brightly with the pro baseball player. The photo was taken at a golf course, which triggered a High School Musical 2 memory for fans.

The Seafarer is just as powerfully a contemplation on what it is to knock along in a life pot-holed with bad luck and dysfunction. Indeed, almost all of the first act is a fly-on-the-wall immersion in a certain kind of seedy male domesticity.Amid peeling wallpaper and rising damp, the house buzzes with bark, banter, and potted philosophizing as mismatched cups, milk possibly past its sell-by date, and a lifetime’s unhealthy relationship with alcohol arrive and depart.

The Iron Claw is officially out in theaters! Starring Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson, and Stanley Simons, the film tells the story of the Von Erich family. White plays Kerry Von Erich, the “Modern Day Warrior,” who became a beloved wrestling superstar worldwide before he died by suicide. To play the role, White had to fit the part, and with training and a lot of eating, he gained 40 pounds of muscle.The 32-year-old star had to live by a strict training regime and consume a lot of calories.

Michaela Zee “The Iron Claw” revolves around the Von Erich family, a dynasty of professional wrestlers who made history in the intensely competitive sport in the early 1980s. Based on a true story, the A24 drama features Von Erich brothers Kevin (Zac Efron), David (Harris Dickinson), Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) and Mike (Stanley Simons). One brother, however, was omitted from the film altogether: Chris Von Erich.

Marc Malkin Senior Editor, Culture and Events Jeremy Allen White may co-star with Zac Efron in Sean Durkin’s new wrestling drama “The Iron Claw,” but the Emmy-winning “The Bear” actor has something to admit — he has never watched a “High School Musical” movie. “I haven’t seen them,” White says on this week’s “Just for Variety” podcast. “Sorry, Zac.

Jeremy Allen White shared a shocking revelation about costar Zac Efron‘s High School Musical movies during an interview on the Just For Variety podcast.

Zac Efron is back on the big screen with his new A24 movie The Iron Claw.

Watching “The Iron Claw” can feel like getting slammed with a metal folding chair over and over again.So bludgeoning are the true and tragic circumstances that befell the famous Von Erich wresting family during the 1980s and 90s, which director Sean Durkin’s film depicts.Running time: 130 minutes. Rated R (language, suicide, some sexuality and drug use.) In theaters.Starting about halfway through the movie that stars Zac Efron in prime meathead mode, a shaken man sitting next to me in the theater repeatedly whispered “What the f–k?” about fifty times.

during an interview on the “Today” show — due to an eye infection. Efron, alongside co-stars Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson and Stanley Simons, appeared on the morning program to promote their new film, “The Iron Claw.” “Zac Efron is a legitimate, bona fide Hollywood superstar but that is not the reason he is in shades right now,” host Craig Melvin laughed as he introduced the quartet. The “High School Musical” actor then apologized for his appearance.“No, I’m sorry, man,” Efron, 36, told Melvin, 44.

Joshua Bassett is now an Emmy award-winning songwriter!

Zac Efron opened up in a confessional new interview.

EXCLUSIVE: Paramount Pictures’ adaptation of Tomi Adeyemi‘s novel Children of Blood and Bone is gaining momentum. Deadline is hearing The Woman King director Gina Prince-Bythewood is coming on to helm. Prince-Bythewood will develop the next pass of a draft penned by Adeyemi.

Zac Efron was two movies deep into the Disney Channel’s “High School Musical” franchise, in which he played singing, dancing basketball phenom Troy Bolton. He’d been the swoony romantic lead in the movie musical “Hairspray,” opposite John Travolta and Michelle Pfeiffer, was shortly to play opposite Matthew Perry in “17 Again,” and had pulled his T-shirt up on the cover of Rolling Stone under the headline “The New American Heartthrob.” At 21, Efron might have seemed like the kind of actor who was as likely to watch footage of the moon landing and decide to become an astronaut as he was to take inspiration from Mickey Rourke’s grizzled, broken-down performance. And yet.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Gladiators, pain freaks, brutes, clowns, true athletes, fake competitors: The slab-of-meat stars of professional wrestling are all those things. And back in the 1980s, when wrestling was reaching its cultural zenith, it almost looked as if you could divide the world between those who took wrestling on the level and those who dismissed it as a vulgar, over-the-top bad joke.

Considering the foothold it has in American pop culture, it’s somewhat surprising that there have been so few movies about pro wrestling. In fact, over the last 15 years, the only real notable narrative films on the subject are Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 drama “The Wrestler” and the solid, but already forgotten 2018 dramedy “Fighting With My Family.” The last 12 months have been something of a sea change, comparably, with Roger Ross Williams’ superb “Cassandro” about famed exótico lucha libre wrestler Saúl Armendáriz and now, Sean Durkin’s “The Iron Claw,” a spotlight on the Von Erichs, one of the most respected and snakebit families in the sport.