“The Iron Claw,” the new prestige wrestling biopic from A24 about the famed and plagued Von Erich family, opens with patriarch Fritz (Holt McCallany) brutalizing another wrestler. There’s no finesse, just sheer violence. This black-and-white sequence is followed by another wrestling scene, this time in color and featuring Kevin Von Erich (Zac Efron).
Unlike his father, the son is an energetic entertainer, drop-kicking his opponent, “the Sheik,” and flying from the top rope.
The juxtaposition of these two matches doesn’t just highlight the evolution of wrestling from the ’60s to the ’70s and ’80s — it also sets the tone for a film its director Sean Durkin calls “an epic Greek tragedy that takes place in Texas.”
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Fritz approached fatherhood with the same barbarity he took into the ring.
And at the center of it all is Chavo Guerrero Jr., who pulls double duty in “The Iron Claw” by playing the Sheik and serving as the movie’s stunt wrestling coordinator.
The scion of America’s most prominent lucha libre family, Guerrero began his wrestling career in 1993 at the famed Olympic Auditorium. It wouldn’t be long before he exploded onto the national scene with his uncle Eddie Guerrero in the World Championship Wrestling and World Wrestling Entertainment promotions. He was a decorated champion throughout his 30-year career, earning the love and admiration of Latino wrestling fans along the way.
Nowadays, Guerrero makes his living using the skills he honed in the ring as Hollywood’s go-to wrestling guy.
“None of us knew how to wrestle, and we had a very short time to learn,” said Harris Dickinson, who plays David Von Erich. “Chavo was a massive part of the film. He would teach us the moves and choreography and work with us every day to make sure we were as authentic as we could be.”
Much like wrestling, Guerrero’s venture into stunt work was a result of following in his family’s footsteps. In the 1980s, his uncle Mando broke into Hollywood thanks to legendary stuntman and wrestling promoter Gene LeBell — the Guerrero family were marquee fighters in his mother’s promotion at the Olympic Auditorium.
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Guerrero says he started taking small roles and doing stunt work by tagging along whenever the duo would go on set. Seeing Mando retire with a SAG-AFTRA pension showed him that there were career prospects that had a longer life expectancy than one inside a ring.
“You get to a point where you say, ‘OK, am I going to be in the pro wrestling business for my entire life, or am I going to have a bit more of a normal life and not be on the road all the time?”
Guerrero chose to step away, a decision that afforded him more time to spend with his wife and kids.
“I remember Jesse Ventura saying that when you need wrestling, wrestling doesn’t need you,” he said, “but when you don’t need wrestling, that’s when wrestling wants you.”
His big break came in 2016 when he was cast in an episode of the NBC supernatural drama “Grimm.” Guerrero played luchador El Mayordomo and even coordinated his own wrestling scenes.
That gig — along with his credit as supervising producer on the short-lived show “Lucha Underground”— begat more work. He was able to parlay his skills into becoming the wrestling coordinator for Netflix’s “GLOW” and then NBC’s “Young Rock.” Being hired on the former show was a full circle moment for his family; in the mid-’80s, Mando was hired to train the original “Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.”
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It was through “GLOW” that he ended up working on “The Iron Claw,” his biggest project to date. Guerrero says Durkin had been trying to get a hold of him for months but he didn’t think much of it until “GLOW” star Alison Brie vouched for the director.
For Guerrero, “The Iron Claw” was also an opportunity to continue a working relationship between the two biggest wrestling families from Texas, one that goes back to 1963, when his grandfather Gory shared the ring with Fritz Von Erich.
“We had our promotion in El Paso while they had their promotion in Dallas,” said Guerrero. “They were obviously much bigger than we were, but we had a great working relationship. It was a rivalry, but it was a working rivalry.”
As the custodian of his family’s legacy, a vital role in the world of wrestling where lineage is as important as the ropes and turnbuckles, Guerrero says it was important to get the story of the Von Erichs right.
It’s a sad tale— all but one of the Von Erich brothers died either by accident or suicide.
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Guerrero has first-hand experience in dealing with a tragic death in his own wrestling family: In 2005, he found his uncle Eddie unconscious in a Minneapolis hotel room. Despite Chavo’s attempts at CPR, paramedics pronounced 38-year-old Eddie Guerrero dead on the scene from acute heart failure.
“When I became the stunt wrestling coordinator on ‘The Iron Claw,’ I contacted Marshall and Ross [Von Erich] and I said, ‘You have my word that I will make it like I’m making it about my own family,” Guerrero told The Times. “That’s the attention to detail that was put into it.”
The world of wrestling, like Hollywood, is filled with those who almost made it. What separates those who end up on the marquee from those who end up in the background is the obsessiveness with their craft.
“There’s a reason these actors are where they’re at in Hollywood, not just because they’re good looking — it’s because their work ethic is second to none. It’s really great to see that it’s not just in wrestling that you have to be an overachiever,” said Guerrero.
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Guerrero is proud. Not just of his work on the film but also his own family’s evolution from the dimly lighted rooms of the Olympic and the Sportatorium to the bright lights of a Hollywood set.
The next generation of Guerreros is ready to make Hollywood its own with Chavo’s youngest son studying to join the film industry. Guerrero offers words of wisdom: ”I told him, ‘All right, man, everybody on a set is an overachiever, every single one of them. You want to make it? You gotta bring it.’”
