Unstoppable, the new film about the high school and college career of wrestler Anthony Robles, who was born with one leg, follows the established tropes of a Hollywood sports drama. There are euphoric wins and devastating losses, tearful familial moments and heartwarming triumphs over adversity – but it never feels dull, thanks to William Goldenberg’s pacey direction and engrossing lead performances from Jharrel Jerome as Robles and Jennifer Lopez as his mother, Judy. Tapping into the same mixture of fight and pathos that made her performances in Out of Sight and Hustlers so compelling, Lopez owns the film, culminating in a rousing moment in its final act when – after hearing a member of the crowd trash-talk her son – she attempts to start a fight in the stands.
“You know what was funny about that? The first time we did it, the extras didn’t know what was gonna happen,” Lopez says, laughing. “When I turned around and started cursing and trying to punch a woman in the face, they were like, ‘What the fuck?’ They didn’t know if I had just gotten mad at somebody.”
Lopez, Jerome and Goldenberg, along with Anthony and Judy Robles, are in London on a rainy November day to discuss Unstoppable. Both Anthony, who rejected the use of a prosthetic leg aged three, and Judy consulted on the film, which Lopez says was key to inhabiting the role of put-upon Judy. “As an actor, it’s not about doing an imitation – I think that’s the worst thing you could do,” she says. “It’s about really taking the essence and understanding, emotionally, what’s going on, and understanding that as a person, and being able to bring that through. I learned this when I did the movie Selena, actually – Edward James Olmos told me ‘Take all of it in, get everything you can.’ And this was when we were filming the big scene in the Astrodome – he goes, ‘Throw it all away. Just do it. It’s in there.’”
Anthony’s story may be inspirational, but it’s a sensitive one for him and his family. The Robles family had previously turned down offers to adapt their story. “We were scared, and kind of worried about who was going to tell it, but [Goldenberg] really put us at ease,” says Anthony. “We could just tell right away that he cared about telling a story that would make us proud. And then meeting Jharrel, Jennifer, as they got to know us, it went from fear to excitement and trust.”
Judy says that agreeing to have the film made meant that “I first had to trust my son, because obviously there are points in this film where I’m not in the best of light.” Meeting Lopez put her at ease. “From the first conversation, I felt like she understood me and who I was. The looks, the mannerisms, the thought process of being a mom and of being a woman, having goals and trying to reach them and roadblocks, I knew immediately,” she says. “She did a great job of being Judy Robles being a wrestler’s mom – the intensity that I would watch with, that I would react with, that was very present. Even my kids said so – like, ‘Oh, mom, that’s you’.”
Goldenberg strove to make Unstoppable feel as close to the Robles’ lives as possible. “Everything in the story is so real – every time we were writing something, most times we would have ideas and say ‘Well, why don’t we just call Anthony and see what happened?’” he recalls. “And nine times out of 10, that was way better than anything we were thinking of.”
Lopez and Jerome say they had no problem connecting with one another and fostering a convincing mother and son dynamic. “Jharrel and I were able to relate on a lot of levels,” she says. We spoke the same language, in a certain way, and we both spoke the language of actors.”
Another reason is because the Robles’ story – that of a struggling Afro-Latino family – is so universal in the United States. Even though, Lopez says carefully, the Arizona-based Robles family are in many ways “very different” from the actors playing them (“we grew up on the other side of the United States”) she and Jerome nonetheless could relate both to them and one another due to growing up in the Bronx.
“So there’s a lot of struggling families, there is the everyday grind,” Lopez says. “It’s like most people in the world, right? You get up every day, you try to do your best. I think Anthony says it best when he says ‘We’re all wrestling with something all the time, and sometimes things go better and you have triumphant moments. But what makes that really special is the struggle you go through on a daily basis.’
Jerome faced a unique challenge of his own: getting physically fit enough to play Anthony convincingly. The wrestler trained him for the film and played his body double during certain scenes (his leg was digitally removed for the rest). “In the brief months of training, I overcame a physical exhaustion I never thought I’d even experience,” he says. “Bruises, so much pain, things I wanted to stop and complain about, but then I’d look over at Anthony — the last thing I’m going to do is complain about anything because of how resilient he’s been.”
Jerome’s casting may raise some eyebrows among those who feel that only disabled actors should play disabled characters, but Anthony Robles says that was never a concern in his eyes. “For me, it was just who could inhabit me best – for Jharrel, he just respected me in my entirety, and that’s something I really appreciated,” he says. “I think that initial meeting for us – we were in there for two hours just talking, and I walked away with a really good feeling about him, and I was like, ‘This is the guy I would love to play me’. And he did so outstandingly.”
“I respect and understand the conversation around disabled actors – it’s always a way to search far and wide for all actors in different spaces,” says Jerome. “But just like Anthony said, the second I met him, and he gave me that co-sign, that was all I needed.”
Aside from Anthony’s wrestling career, Unstoppable also spends a lot of time exploring Judy’s difficult relationship with Anthony’s stepfather, called Rick in the film and played with menacing gusto by Bobby Cannavale. Lopez once played a victim of domestic abuse in 2002’s Enough, but she says she “really didn’t think about the movie Enough when I was doing this … I thought this was more about the Robles’ story, and it was kind of like taking Judy’s experiences and her feelings about these things, and then taking what I know and understand about things and putting it in there too.
“Relationships are complicated,” she continues, “and we’ve all been in complicated relationships in our lives, so we all understand that to a certain degree – where you’re somewhere where you’re like, this doesn’t feel right, this doesn’t feel good, this feels a little weird, this feels a little abusive. We can all relate to that or understand that in some way.”
Although Judy sometimes struggled with having her life be put on display in such a way, she never requested that anything in Unstoppable be removed or softened. “The harder scenes, it was a conversation for all of my kids, because that’s their dad at the end of the day, and they had to watch it too,” she says. “Anthony had always protected us from that exposure, so I know he was concerned about that, but my kids know the reality of our lives in the situation, and nothing in there was too far from the truth, so that was hard to see. But, I mean, everything in there was pretty accurate, which is scary and wonderful in the same way.”
Although Unstoppable is set in the late 2000s, it’s remarkable to see how few aspects of the film, such as the general instability of life for many Latino families, have materially changed. Although I’m warned not to ask about the results of the US election, which were called that morning, or else risk Lopez’s publicist kicking me out, Lopez does offer her thoughts on four more years of Trump. “I think right now, the most important thing is to spread love and goodness,” she says, looking at her phone. “And really, you know, spread light. That has always been my focus with what I do, and that’s what I intend to keep on doing.”
Goldenberg suggests that, in that sense, Unstoppable is the perfect film for the current moment. “You keep your head down and do your work and try to make your life better, and the peoples’ lives around you better,” he says. “I think this film hopefully has a way of bringing people together – I think it can.”
• Unstoppable is released in the UK on 6 December and streams on Prime Video on 16 January 2025
