“it was definitely the toughest thing mentally, emotionally, and physically. It was the toughest thing. Having to spend five years on this was not something that I thought was going to happen. And I think it really changed me in so many ways.” That’s Ryan Destiny exhaling over Rachel Morrison‘s film “The Fire Inside” finally arriving in theaters. A movie that officially died during the pandemic, then almost died right after, and took another two years to debut following the guild strikes of 2023. The fact the movie is as good as it is being crafted under those circumstances is almost as incredible as the story of its subject matter, American boxer Claressa “T-Rex” Shields.
READ MORE: ‘The Fire Inside’ Review: Ryan Destiny throws like a champ in another underdog boxing tale [TIFF]
An original screenplay by Barry Jenkins, “The Fire Inside,” originally began production on March 11, 2020, as a Universal Studios release. Three days later, the world closed down, and the project was put on hold. A few months later, Morrison called Destiny to inform her that, like some other television projects and films at the time, “Fire” had been scuttled. This decision was partially because Ice Cube, who portrayed Shields’ real-life coach, Jason Crutchfield, refused to get vaccinated. Then Amazon MGM Studios came to the rescue. Brian Tyree Henry took over the role of Crutchfield, and production resumed over two years from the original start date in 2022.
Over five years, Destiny, best known for her roles in “Star” and “Grown-ish,” had started and stopped boxing training three different times. She could have walked away, but she didn’t. The role was simply too special.
“This isn’t a story that comes across the audition table all the time. It was very rare in that way,” Destiny says. “And also the people behind it, I’m such a fan of Rachel, I’m such a fan of Barry, and I knew that they would take good care of it. So, I think it was just all of those elements that were just making me not want to give up. I’m like, ‘I know this is something that’s very special,’ and I knew it was something that would challenge me in a good way, and that’s something that I had been wanting for a very long time. And then, after you put so much of your heart into it in the first round, it’s hard to let go.”
Destiny adds, “You get very attached to the character, you get very attached to everyone else around it. So, it was definitely not an option for me to let go. If anything, I was trying to make sure no one let go of me. ‘I promise I can still look 16, 17 years old!’ I’m like, ‘Nothing’s changed, I swear!’”
You can discover more about this incredible Hollywood story in our interview conducted earlier this month.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Playlist: This has been a super long project. How many times did you think the film was just never going to happen or never get completed?
Ryan Destiny: Maybe twice, I think twice. Twice in total.
Were you skeptical when they would say, “We’re going to come back and do it,” or did you always believe?
The first time? I believed it the first time. I guess when the pandemic itself started, I was like, “Oh yeah, we’ll be back. Who knows?” I don’t think any of us realized it would go that way and be that long of a pause, but I think I believed it for a few months. I was like, “O.K., I feel good. It’s all right. Nothing’s going to break us.” And then you start seeing these different things about how it’s not happening anymore, or this show got canceled or this, and then it’s like, “Wait a second, hold on.” And then I ended up getting a call from Rachel, our director, saying that it was not happening officially, and that really broke the both of us. That was a very dark time. That happened and I think she even had more hope in that moment that they could shop it around and it’ll get picked back up. But in my mind I was like, “This is over, this is done. It’s done.” So, it was a very sad time. I went into a little bit of a depressive mode a little bit.
What was the timeline of finding out it was alive again? Was it a month later? Was it two weeks later?
If I remember correctly, it was like a month after that initial conversation that it was like, “Oh, so they’re going to repackage it, and they’re going to try to sell it and see who bites.” That’s when that conversation happened. And even then, it was like, hopefully, that happens. Hopefully, someone does bite. I think I was trying to make peace with it. I was trying to make peace with the fact that it might not be a thing again. So, it was definitely some time, a month, and then it took probably a good year, I want to say, for it to be like, “O.K., we’re officially back up.” Yeah.
How much training had you done when you were first going to shoot it?
The first time going to shoot it, I was in it for four months.
So you’d done four months of training, and then another year off. I’m assuming when you thought it was dead, you stopped?
I definitely had no motivation. [Laughs.] After knowing it was done, I was like, “Well, let me just go back in bed.” I wish I had kept it up. There was a time, there was some time for sure, when I did keep it up. I was like, “It’s just me and my coach, my boxing trainer. We’re just going to keep at this.” And then, as time went on, I just definitely went into a mode where I’m like, “You know what? I am just going to sit here in my head.”
When you started training again did it feel like riding a bike? Did you feel like it was easier the second or third time around?
A little bit. I do remember there was a point where I went in because Michael B. Jordan and I have the same boxing trainer. And because of that, he was also training Mike at the time, and they’re like, “Come on in, come in and just spar a little bit, play around a little bit.” And I was not back in yet. It was probably just the start, the first week of me going back in. And because I had taken a year and a half off at that point, I had lost so much of it. I had no stamina anymore. I was out of breath in the first five minutes. It was so embarrassing. So, I definitely felt like I still had the, I guess, movement down and that natural movement that I knew that I needed, but the actual stamina was completely gone. I was literally about to fall out at that training session. So yeah, it was a little bit of both.
In some boxing films, every single punch is choreographed. There’s so much boxing in this film. Were you sparring trying to interpret what happened during the real fights, or was it that choreographed?
It was definitely choreographed completely, and we definitely tried to make it as true as possible to the actual [boxing] that happened because there was some storytelling in that each fight has a different meaning of what’s going on in Clarissa’s life at the time. So, in one fight, she literally lost, and that.
Feels very different from when she’s dominating. And so it all blended a little bit in my head as far as the choreography goes, there’s only so many ways you can throw a punch, but it helped because it was definitely just done in a certain way specifically for each story that we were trying to tell within the fight itself. It just depended on what point it was, but it was choreographed completely, and I was definitely confused at one point because it all got jumbled in my head. All the fights, as well as the training sessions, all choreographed.
When you say it got jumbled, meaning you would be on set shooting it and you weren’t sure whether it was choreography or whether you were just fighting yourself?
No, I mean, in a way, where, how can I explain it? If I’m doing a fight, one of the movements that we’d have to do together would blend in with another movement from another fight that we have not yet. So, when I would be doing it with the other person, each fighter that I had, that was their only thing because there were different [adversaries] for each fight. That was their only choreo. They remembered each of their own fights. I had to remember six, seven, eight fights, and it just got so jumbled up. I leaned on the stunt team for that, and they remembered a lot of the things. So, then I would catch on pretty quick again, like, “Oh, that’s that one. OK., I got it. I can do that, and we’re good.” But yeah, luckily, we recorded everything as well, so I could just watch it and get that back in my mind until it’d be second nature after a little bit.
With boxing films, and I’m sure every one is different, but in your case, are you pulling every punch? Is the whole idea to try to make it look like you’re hitting when they’re trying to make it look like they’re hitting you, or is it just sometimes it is what it is?
You’re definitely going completely for it. You definitely want that speed, and you want the strength of the punch for sure. It’s being filmed, I guess, in the most believable way. If something’s done too slow, it’s not as exciting anymore. We just had to learn our distance. That was the biggest thing. Because of that, I definitely got hit a few times because if you’re just too close by a little bit, you’re hitting the person across from you. It was, I guess, dancing between having to work for the camera. And I guess the biggest difference is making sure that your punches are a bit wider than they normally would be so the camera catches it. That was just a difference that we all had to kind of relearn because in actual boxing, you don’t want to be as wide or as long, or it would feel weird. But for the camera, you have to do it a little differently.
After the first iteration of this project fell apart, you could have moved on. Let them recast and do the next thing. What about Clarissa’s story made you want to keep to stick with this film?
I mean, I knew how special it was. This isn’t a story that comes across the audition table all the time. It was very rare in that way. And also the people behind it, I’m such a fan of Rachel, I’m such a fan of Barry, and I knew that they would take good care of it. So, I think it was just all of those elements that were just making me not want to give up. I’m like, “I know this is something that’s very special,” and I knew it was something that would challenge me in a good way, and that’s something that I had been wanting for a very long time. And then, after you put so much of your heart into it in the first round, it’s hard to let go. You get very attached to the character; you get very attached to everyone else around it. So, it was definitely not an option for me to let go. If anything, I was trying to make sure no one let go of me. “I promise I can still look 16, 17-years-old!” I’m like, “Nothing’s changed, I swear!”
