‘The Iron Claw’ Director Sean Durkin on Masculinity, the Tragedy of the Von Erichs, and Finding the Facts Behind “Wrestling-World Nonsense”

“There’s so much gossip, there’s so much shit-talking, that we really had to find reputable sources,” Durkin says.

But it also forced Durkin to make difficult choices about what to include in the film given just how many upsetting events happened to the Von Erichs, who believed there was a curse hanging over their family. The most significant exclusion Durkin decided on involved eliminating the story of Chris Von Erich, another brother who died by suicide, and assigning some of his traits to brother Mike (Stanley Simons.)

“At a certain point you have to separate yourself from the humans who you love,” he says, “and say, okay, as a film, as a script, in terms of getting this made there is just a repetition in the loss that a film of this nature can’t really sustain.”

Having had the experience prior of getting too close to the actual subjects he was trying to write about, Durkin didn’t reach out to the real Kevin Von Erich until right before the movie went into prep, and after he was already certain of his decisions. Before the surviving members of the Von Erich family watched the film, he had a Zoom with them to warn them of what was to come. “I told him about Chris, which I thought was going to be the hardest, biggest thing, and Kevin was like, ‘Yeah, that makes a lot of sense,’” Durkin remembers.

Durkin saw the film as a Greek tragedy, and imbues it with mythical qualities, including a scene near the end where the fallen Von Erichs meet in the afterlife. That sequence offers a different portrait of the men than we have seen up until this point. They are, as Durkin puts it, “energetically in their own skin,” and tender in a way—a contrast to the rigid camaraderie of the wrestling ring, for which the actors did all their own stunts.

“The film to me always was about, you take boys and you fit them into these molds of masculinity that aren’t real, that aren’t true and you ignore the individual aspects, the details of each person and their nuances and try to fit them into a mold,” Durkin says. “And that is ultimately what creates this tragedy.”