2024 PREVIEW
21 It’s Clobbering Time
PREPARE TO MEET WRESTLING’S MOST NOTORIOUS FAMILY
Kevin Von Erich (Zac Efron, mid-flight) in the ring.
THE IRON CLAW
OUT 9 FEB
WHEN SEAN DURKIN was a kid living in north London, he had three dreams: 1) to play for Arsenal, 2) to be a professional wrestler, and 3) to become a film director. At 41, he concedes his first one is unlikely to happen. But his latest film, The Iron Claw, combines the second and the third in a way that looks both thrilling and gut-wrenching.
“It’s a story I’ve lived with for a long time,” he tells Empire. “As a kid in the late ’80s, early ’90s, I was really obsessed with wrestling.” He would watch it on TV habitually and his dad would take him to every live show going. “I would get wrestling magazines, and I would find old videos. I must have found an old videotape of the Best Of NWA [National Wrestling Alliance] Matches — that’s where I would have seen the Von Erichs for the first time.”