Sydney Sweeney's 'Christy' Transformation is Like Nothing We've Seen

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Demi Moore in GI Jane. Charlize Theron in Monster, and then again in Fury Road. Halle Berry in that one MMA movie you probably forgot. Actresses famed in part for their beauty getting butch and blue collar and frumpy for an awards bid is not only nothing new, it’s basically a rite of passage.

Nothing proves commitment to the craft of acting like one of People’s Most Beautiful People willingly becoming unbeautiful. Extra points for a military or combat sports physical transformations, which excludes the even more commonplace de-glammings, like Anne Hathaway rubbing some dirt on her face in Les Mis, Nicole Kidman’s big fake nose in The Hours, or, my favorite version, and possibly the peak of the phenomenon, Bradley Cooper playing The Elephant Man for the West End without benefit of prosthetics, just by making a weird face the entire time. (Based on the pictures I’ve seen, he didn’t even stop shaving his chest for the occasion).

I could go on, but you get it: we’ve all seen something like Sydney Sweeney’s turn as boxer Christy Martin in Christy many times. And yet I don’t think anyone has ever done it quite this successfully, with quite this degree of difficulty. That’s not to say that Sydney Sweeney is so much more beautiful or that the role of boxer Christy Martin is so much less glamorous than any other attempt like this, it’s more that there’s a physical component to it that makes it tougher than most. And Sweeney manages to nail it in a way I’m not sure we’ve ever seen.

The most obvious analogue would be The Rock in The Smashing Machine, a movie that came out only few months ago. But as good as The Rock was in the role, and for as many magazine profiles he spawned for his “transformation” (allegedly steroid-free, lol!) a buff, pro wrestling ex-football player getting even buffer to play an early MMA pioneer seems like a lighter lift than our modern-day Marilyn Monroe becoming a convincing boxer.

And Sydney Sweeney’s boxing is convincing in Christy, maybe even more convincing than her acting. The track record of boxing-based blockbusters and critical darlings—Rocky, Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby, Creed, Cinderella Man, etc. etc.—tends to obscure an even more basic movie fact: it’s really hard to make boxing look convincing on screen. Even the actual boxing scenes in those movies previously mentioned looks pretty bad. Most of us have seen real boxing so often that the margin for error on the illusion of it is miniscule, and few moments in media historically require as much suspension of disbelief as actors attempting athletic movements. It often creates a situation in which you can pinpoint the precise moment when the illusion breaks down. I myself am something of a connoisseur of them:

I think it’s important to lay out my particular biases here, because even to my jaundiced eyes, Sydney Sweeney’s boxing is some of the most convincing we’ve ever seen an actor do onscreen. Certainly the most convincing we’ve ever seen from one known formerly for being America’s Official Blonde Bombshell1.

Some of the credit for that goes to Christy’s director, the wildly underrated David Michod (The King, War Machine, The Rover, Animal Kingdom—bangers, all), who has a knack for choosing just the right angles, blocking, and sound effects to maintain the illusion, in a way that even Benny Safdie didn’t quite manage in The Smashing Machine (in that case, admittedly, I may somewhat biased by familiarity with the source). If Michod’s hand shows in the fight scenes, the bag work and shadow boxing are all Sweeney. They don’t generally give actors Oscars for looking convincingly athletic, but considering how rare it is, maybe they should.

As for the movie, imagine a more straightforward I, Tonya. If Christy lacks some of I, Tonya’s essential screwball appeal, that’s probably just due to the story being much less a comedy of errors and more a harrowing tale of personal triumph. Christy Martin, who begins the story as Christy Salter, has her own Jeff Gilooly, though in her case he’s far more legitimately menacing, with much of the same incompetent desperation but little of the Benny Hill charm. The always excellent Ben Foster, in full 80s combover and sides, plays Jim Martin, Christy’s stub-limbed, paunchy boxing trainer turned attempted Svengali. In the porn industry, guys like Jim Martin, budding backwater tyrants who’ve turned their (usually much younger and more attractive) paramours into their meal ticket, are such a recognizable archetype that they even have a name: Suitcase Pimps. They follow around the talent like lost doggies, usually trying to negotiate their contracts and control their finances, always in the guise of being their biggest supporters.

Christy, meanwhile, is uniquely susceptible to Martin’s influence, as someone basically without any support system. She has parents, sure (played by Merritt Wever and a you’ll-never-believe-it’s-him Ethan Embry), but they seem far more concerned with her not embarrassing them than with protecting her. Christy is a butch jock lesbian, in a relationship with her basketball teammate—seemingly successful in love and athletics, we should all be so lucky etc—but unfortunate to be growing up in 1980s West Virginia, a time and place progressive enough to reward female athleticism, but backward enough that this goes only for heterosexual female athleticism. Her parents threaten to disown her, her girlfriend eventually dumps her for a guy, and even when she finally seems to find her niche competing in Toughman Competitions (the same proto-MMA, amateur boxing phenomenon that gave us Butterbean), promoters tell Christy things like “You should grow your hair out a little, no one wants to pay to see a dyke fight.”

Yet she puts together a few wins and eventually gets connected with boxing trainer Jim Martin, who, very reluctantly at first, agrees to train her. Soon he comes to see her as the money-making opportunity she is, and oops, she’s maybe kinda sexy too, and pretty soon they’re a team both professionally and personally. Well, sort of. When Martin proposes in the parking lot of a proverbial Cracker Barrel, it’s as much a threat and an ultimatum as it is an expression of affection. “If you’re serious about this boxing thing, you must also be serious about cosplaying heterosexuality, and I’m your only avenue here,” is the gist of Martin’s pitch.

And so she says yes, even though Jim Martin is clearly a petty tyrant, and sort of a phony name-dropper to boot. When Christy finally gets the meeting with Don King that Martin has been dangling over her head since they met without his help, King (played with a mix of ingratiating gregariousness tinged with spine-tingling menace by Chad L. Coleman, I would’ve watched an entire movie just about him) refuses to play along with Martin’s ruse that they’ve already met. Foster and Coleman are both perfectly cast, as is the entire ensemble, which includes Bryan Hibbard as Christy’s Elvis impersonating co-trainer and a nearly unrecognizable Tony Cavalero (Kief from Gemstones) as her sparring partner “Short Dog.” It’s not the most important role, but Cavalero is slowly inching his way towards Paul Walter Hauser status as one of our most never-not-good character actors.