The Big Picture

Collider’s Perri Nemiroff sits down with The Iron Claw stars Holt McCallany and Maura Tierney, who play Fritz and Doris. During their conversation, McCallany revisits filming a key scene for their characters that wound up on the cutting room floor. Tierney also offers her take on when Doris starts to question her faith, something we don’t see in the film but can still feel informing her performance.

Deleted scenes are almost always inevitable and while it can be tough to let some moments go, those decisions are made in an effort to best serve the finished film. That’s what happened with a few key scenes for Holt McCallany’s Fritz and Maura Tierney’s Doris in The Iron Claw.

The movie largely focuses on Kevin Von Erich (Zac Efron) and his brothers (Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson and Stanley Simons). Under their father’s (McCallany) guidance, they aim to rise in the ranks in the professional wrestling space. Along the way, they are forced to power through Fritz’s extreme demands and expectations and a crushing amount of tragedy in order to stand in the spotlight on the biggest stage in sports.

While the finished cut of The Iron Claw does include an effective story thread covering the evolution of Fritz and Doris’ relationship, at a time, there was more to it than what we now see on screen. During a recent interview with McCallany and Tierney, the pair revisited one particular bedroom scene that marked a major turning point in their relationship that didn’t make it into the final cut of the film. Hear all about it in great detail in the video interview at the top of this article, or you can read about it in the interview transcript below.

The Iron Claw The true story of the inseparable Von Erich brothers, who made history in the intensely competitive world of professional wrestling in the early 1980s. Through tragedy and triumph, under the shadow of their domineering father and coach, the brothers seek larger-than-life immortality on the biggest stage in sports. Release Date December 22, 2023 Runtime 130 minutes

PERRI NEMIROFF: I love highlighting the value of a good scene partner and you have many in this movie. Can you each name a time on set when a scene partner gave you just what you needed so you could crush a tough scene or maybe reach something in your character that you wouldn’t have been able to without them?

HOLT MCCALLANY: You’re gonna hate my answer …

MAURA TIERNEY: You liked acting with yourself best? [Laughs]

MCCALLANY: No. It was a scene between Doris and Fritz in the bedroom where, for the first time, he gets an inkling that there’s something changing in their relationship and in their marriage. The way Sean staged it, Maura had her back to me and so she couldn’t see my face, but it was the way that she was saying what she was saying to me and the inherent message of her words that were devastating to Fritz because I think he was a guy who only loved one woman in his life. The scene didn’t make the final cut, so what can I say to you, except, if DVDs ever come back, then maybe. It didn’t make it in, but you asked me which scene and it was that scene in the bedroom between you and me.

TIERNEY: There’s another scene in the bed — they cut all the bedroom scenes — that was earlier on where she’s kind of begging him to go to church because for a while he stops going to church.

Image via A24

MCCALLANY: That’s a very, very, very good example of another scene which sadly did not make the final cut. Fritz was a religious man, but Fritz also began to question his faith. Not so much the existence of God, but why God had singled him out for so many tragedies. “What did I ever do to deserve to lose my youngest son?” Then to lose David, who was kind of the star of the family at that juncture, and then to have my son Mike end up in a coma. He had, for a long time, an almost antagonistic relationship with God. That might sound like a very unusual thing for a religious man, but it wasn’t for Fritz. He believed in God, he believed he was a good Christian, and he didn’t believe that he deserved these tragedies. The scene that Maura is referring to is one in which she encourages me to kind of put all that I’m describing behind me and come to church with her and with the family, and I decline.

TIERNEY: No, you don’t. You go. I was gonna say, there’s a nice interplay between us because it was playful. It wasn’t like, “You have to come to church,” and, “No, I hate God!” She was trying to charm him. I just thought the scene was really light and it was about a fairly serious subject matter for her, so I really enjoyed that. But then you go to church.

MCCALLANY: I end up going to church, but if you recall, there was a scene in which, initially, you go to church with the boys and Fritz stays home to watch the Dallas Cowboys because he was a big Cowboys fan, because Fritz had been a football player before he became a wrestler. And then later, she persuades me to go against my …

TIERNEY: Yeah, you don’t wanna go.

MCCALLANY: I don’t wanna go, and not because I’m not a believer. It’s because of all the reasons I described a few minutes ago. So those were two sort of wonderful scenes. Look, the edit is the edit. What can I tell ya?

Holt McCallany on Fritz Von Erich: “I Think He Died Lonely and Filled With Regret”
Image via A24

The edit is the edit, but knowing those scenes aren’t in the film, it might make people go and buy it. Whether it’s on DVD or digital, the deleted scenes are there and it winds up enriching the experience of the story after the fact, so they’ll still probably live on – or at least I’m trying to speak that into existence right now.

TIERNEY: In a sense, it informed our relationship as actors. Sometimes things will happen in rehearsal or whatever and it’s not in the finished product, but it feeds the whole. It informs the performance sometimes, whether or not it makes the final cut, or if you’re in the theater, like I say. There’s stuff you’ll try that’s not gonna end up in the production, but it helps to create a cohesive sort of chemistry with the cast.

Oh, without a doubt. To build on that, because there’s only so much of this family’s story that could be fit into a 2-hour and 10-minute movie…

TIERNEY: That’s all anyone can take.

Seriously! Is there anything you learned about the real Doris and the real Fritz that isn’t seen on screen or heard via dialogue, but you held tight to and now we could feel it informing your performances?

MCCALLANY: For me, the answer to that would be that I think that when Doris leaves Fritz after a 40-year marriage that it was an absolutely devastating thing for him, and I don’t think he ever recovered from it. We don’t see it in the movie, but he died a few years later and I think he died lonely and filled with regret.

TIERNEY: I think a personal choice I made that I didn’t tell anybody about, I believe that Doris starts questioning her faith way before she admits that she’s questioning her faith. That’s just how I was [feeling]. At this point, I don’t know, I think it might be a charade for her or the last thing that she’s hanging on to. But I think before she told anybody else in the family, I think there was probably a lapse in her because she felt betrayed by God, too, she just wasn’t allowed to say it.

Looking for more The Iron Claw talk? Catch my 27-minute Collider Ladies Night conversation with Tierney below:

The Iron Claw is now playing in theaters in the U.S. Click below for showtimes.

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