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So much tragedy befell the Von Erich wrestling family that when Sean Durkin<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 \u201cWhen we did our first round of research, laid out a family timeline, and looked at the big picture of what the film could be, it was so epic,\u201d says Durkin, a lifelong wrestling fanatic who spent eight years making The<\/em> Iron Claw,<\/em> the heartbreaking A24 drama opening in theaters Friday. \u201cI knew it was going to be a long journey to find a film within there. It was too much to include.\u201d<\/p>\n The film wastes little time introducing viewers to the Von Erichs, a sports dynasty so famous for loss that they\u2019ve been called the Kennedys of wrestling. Mindhunter\u2019s<\/em> Holt McCallany<\/strong> plays the strict patriarch, heavyweight champion Fritz Von Erich (n\u00e9 Jack Adkisson Sr.), who spent his life making the sport a family business with his wife Doris (Maura Tierney<\/strong>) and his adopted name, a nod to the Nazi heel (a.k.a. a bad guy, in wrestling slang) he portrayed in the ring.<\/p>\n Zac Efron<\/strong> plays Kevin,<\/strong> the protective oldest sibling after a freak accident killed Fritz and Doris\u2019s firstborn Jack Jr., when he was age six or seven. Kevin tells us this in voice-over, explaining how far back the family curse stretches. Then we meet brothers Mike, David, and Kerry (Stanley Simons,<\/strong> Harris Dickinson,<\/strong> and Jeremy Allen White<\/strong>), only to see each felled by the end of the film\u2019s run time. David dies suddenly in a Tokyo hotel room in 1984, before both Mike and Kerry take their own lives\u2014Mike in 1987, by overdose, and Kerry in 1993, after shooting himself in the chest.\u00a0<\/p>\n In real life, there was another brother: Chris. Described by Texas Monthly<\/em><\/a> as \u201cthe baby, the brother who didn\u2019t look like a Von Erich,\u201d who had been rendered \u201cstunted and round\u201d from chronic asthma treatment, Chris also died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1991, after a life spent like Mike\u2019s\u2014in his brothers\u2019 shadows and unable to conform to Fritz\u2019s ideal.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was the hardest decision I made,\u201d the filmmaker previously told Vulture<\/em><\/a> about his decision to remove Chris from Iron Claw<\/em> altogether. \u201cThe movie just couldn\u2019t withstand another brother\u2019s death. It\u2019s hard to say this from a human level, but from a narrative and character standpoint, there\u2019s a repetition that\u2019s just hard to take. Mike, Kerry, and Chris all suffered similar fates: They took a gun or a bottle of pills into a field on their ranch and killed themselves overnight.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n There were other precious cuts too. For a while, Durkin contemplated including the 1959 death of Fritz and Doris\u2019s firstborn child into the script. The story of that sad passing, per D Magazin<\/em>e<\/a>:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
wrote a film about them, he found himself excising whole deaths from the script.<\/p>\n