Ben Foster, left, plays the titular Christy’s abusive husband-slash-trainer Jim Martin. Christy Martin, played by Sydney Sweeney, was the first woman elected to the Nevada Boxing Hall of Fame.Elevation Pictures
It is easy to see why actors’ ears tend to perk up when they are offered the opportunity to star in a boxing movie.
The beautiful and brutal sport offers a naturally irresistible dramatic arc, with its players so often starting from nothing before going on to become champions who are then, almost inevitably, forced to reckon with mortality as their bodies age and their glories fade. Bonus: the stars must often bulk up their bodies to fit the highs and lows of a life spent in the ring, their physical transformations not only proving their professional commitment, but also garnering some easy awards-friendly headlines. Think of Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. Daniel Day-Lewis in The Boxer. Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby. And, now Sydney Sweeney in the new drama Christy.
In Christy, Sydney Sweeney punches well above the boxing biopic’s welterweight
Already, America’s most talked-about actress is ticking off all the right angles for her performance as Christy Martin, a groundbreaking fighter from West Virginia whose bouts helped her become the first woman elected to the Nevada Boxing Hall of Fame.
Over the course of three-and-a-half months, Sweeney endured a daily training regimen involving two hours of weights, two hours of kickboxing, and, to further bulk up, too many meals to count. To further push the border between reality and fiction, Christy Martin herself was frequently on set, part of director David Michôd’s bid to stick as closely to the real drama as possible. The hard work paid off, with the actress offering the kind of unpredictable transformation that mints Oscar winners.
For Christy, director David Michôd wanted to stick as closely to the real story as possible. That meant an intense regimen for star Sydney Sweeney, with hours of daily training.Elevation Pictures
And yet there is a second, less discussed, but just as impressive performance that anchors the other half of Christy: Ben Foster, who plays Christy’s abusive husband-slash-trainer, Jim Martin. Contorting his body into a monster of a man, Foster offers a villain with a mean grin, a slimy combover, and a heft that suggests a seriously dangerous commitment to self-loathing.
The performance is just about as far as possible from the image that most audiences have of the wiry actor, who started off as a teen-comedy star (2001’s Get Over It), before becoming something of a contemporary Western star, energizing everything from 3:10 to Yuma to Hell or High Water. And yet, Foster doesn’t see his transformation in Christy as something radical – at least not compared to his co-star.
“If you have the time, it makes your job easier – you don’t have to think about it on the set, that way that one lives in their body, in their character. Because behaviour is character,” Foster says in an interview about packing on the pounds to play Martin. “While Syd was putting in five hours of extra training, I was just eating a lot of extra burritos.”
And yet the change required its own kind of dedication for Foster – and proved to be a neat reversal from his last big boxing movie, the 2021 drama The Survivor, in which he played a real-life Auschwitz prisoner who fought fellow inmates in order to survive, and which required him to lose more than 60 pounds over the course of five months of training. Did that experience leave him wary of going through any kind of other physical regimen?
“I don’t want to lean into the ‘haunted artist’ conversation as much as anybody, but when you’re doing one thing for 16 hours a day, for six to eight weeks, there’s going to be residue, no matter what,” he says today. “But for this film, it’s about ordering chicken fingers at the end of the day, which is not haunting. That’s what you’re thinking about.”
Chicken-finger dinners aside, Foster encountered an extra layer of challenges on the Christy set thanks to the regular presence of the real-life Martin, who was involved in the production almost from the get-go alongside director Michôd and screenwriter Mirrah Foulkes.
Ben Foster, Christy Martin and Sydney Sweeney at the AFI Fest premiere of Christy on Oct. 25 in Los Angeles.Jordan Strauss/The Associated Press
“There’s a lot of responsibility there, and I know Syd and Christy became close over the filming. As for myself, I vividly remember [Christy] coming to the set, and I was dressed as Jim, and she hadn’t seen me like that before, and she just went ashen white and walked out the door,” Foster recalls. “It was communicated to me that she said something like, ‘I want nothing to do with that guy. That’s Jim Martin.’ I think that’s a compliment.” (Today, though, Foster can “very proudly” call the real Christy his friend.)
In a way, the weight that the film places upon Foster’s shoulders and the time that the film gives to exploring Jim Martin’s revolting selfishness give the film a more consistent through-line when it comes to understanding why a director such as Michôd took on Christy in the first place. After all, the Australian filmmaker behind Animal Kingdom, The Rover, and The King has made a career out of making movies featuring, in his own words, “idiot dudes” and “deluded men.”
“It’s one of those things you see in retrospect, you get a number of films down the track and look back and go, ‘Oh, wow, there’s a recurring theme here,’ which I think is a fear I have of living in a world run by these kind of monstrous men,” Michôd says in a separate interview.
“Sometimes it’s the well-meaning ones who just think that they’re smarter than they are ... I wanted to make a movie about a woman with a big personality, but what I like about this story is there’s a really clear subtext that made the movie multidimensional, too.”
Foster, meanwhile, is just satisfied that the film is getting a wide release as the first title to be theatrically distributed in the U.S. from longtime production company Black Bear – an awards-friendly fate different from that of The Survivor, and so many other contemporary dramas that tackle difficult subject matter with an unflinching eye.
“It’s really tricky out there, but Black Bear putting this film as their first, well, they’re great champions of independent film, and that means a lot today,” the actor says. “This isn’t coming from a specific piece of [intellectual property], it isn’t a franchise. For this film to have champions like that, it’s heartening. You have to keep making things, and sparking conversation.”
Christy opens in theatres Nov. 7.