So much tragedy befell the Von Erich wrestling family that when Sean Durkin wrote a film about them, he found himself excising whole deaths from the script.

“When we did our first round of research, laid out a family timeline, and looked at the big picture of what the film could be, it was so epic,” says Durkin, a lifelong wrestling fanatic who spent eight years making The Iron Claw, the heartbreaking A24 drama opening in theaters Friday. “I knew it was going to be a long journey to find a film within there. It was too much to include.”

The film wastes little time introducing viewers to the Von Erichs, a sports dynasty so famous for loss that they’ve been called the Kennedys of wrestling. Mindhunter’s Holt McCallany plays the strict patriarch, heavyweight champion Fritz Von Erich (né Jack Adkisson Sr.), who spent his life making the sport a family business with his wife Doris (Maura Tierney) and his adopted name, a nod to the Nazi heel (a.k.a. a bad guy, in wrestling slang) he portrayed in the ring.

Zac Efron plays Kevin, the protective oldest sibling after a freak accident killed Fritz and Doris’s firstborn Jack Jr., when he was age six or seven. Kevin tells us this in voice-over, explaining how far back the family curse stretches. Then we meet brothers Mike, David, and Kerry (Stanley Simons, Harris Dickinson, and Jeremy Allen White), only to see each felled by the end of the film’s run time. David dies suddenly in a Tokyo hotel room in 1984, before both Mike and Kerry take their own lives—Mike in 1987, by overdose, and Kerry in 1993, after shooting himself in the chest. 

In real life, there was another brother: Chris. Described by Texas Monthly as “the baby, the brother who didn’t look like a Von Erich,” who had been rendered “stunted and round” from chronic asthma treatment, Chris also died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1991, after a life spent like Mike’s—in his brothers’ shadows and unable to conform to Fritz’s ideal.

“It was the hardest decision I made,” the filmmaker previously told Vulture about his decision to remove Chris from Iron Claw altogether. “The movie just couldn’t withstand another brother’s death. It’s hard to say this from a human level, but from a narrative and character standpoint, there’s a repetition that’s just hard to take. Mike, Kerry, and Chris all suffered similar fates: They took a gun or a bottle of pills into a field on their ranch and killed themselves overnight.” 

There were other precious cuts too. For a while, Durkin contemplated including the 1959 death of Fritz and Doris’s firstborn child into the script. The story of that sad passing, per D Magazine:

Fritz was out of town on a wrestling trip [when] Jackie, then 7, touched a live wire while he was playing in the trailer park. Electrocuted, he fell down face first in a puddle of melting snow and drowned. It was a nightmare for Fritz and his wife. Doris felt herself going weak; she told her husband she wanted to die too. Years later, she would still judge time by recalling her first son’s death (“It happened nearly 12 years after Jackie died,” she will say about some family event).

Explains Durkin, “It was such a life-changing moment, not only for the parents but also for all the other kids—even the ones who weren’t born yet—to live in that shadow.” The loss sent Fritz and Doris in different directions. Fritz said he “started blaming the entire wrestling business for the death of my oldest boy… I got such a bad reputation for being overly aggressive in the ring that some wrestlers even turned down matches with me” according to Texas Monthly. Doris, meanwhile, said, “After you lose the first one, there is that nagging fear you’ll lose another. You not only believe it can happen to you, you know it’s going to almost. It’s a horrible thing to live with.” Ultimately, Durkin says it was too difficult to “transition to that backstory.” 

The filmmaker also toyed with the idea of showing more of David’s personal story. Before he suddenly died in Japan, David had known his own parental heartbreak: His daughter Natosha died at 13 weeks old from sudden infant death syndrome, and his first marriage dissolved soon after.

In the film, Kerry’s arc is also abbreviated. In The Iron Claw, Kerry’s foot is amputated after a motorcycle accident. The actual Kerry drove his motorcycle into a police car in 1986, injuring his foot. It was only after he tried to wrestle, and again hurt his foot, that he had to have it amputated. In real life, though, the family kept the amputation a secret—meaning that in the years that followed, the crowds cheering Kerry had no idea he had a prosthetic leg, and was suffering because of it. 

Per Texas Monthly: 

Wrestling on the fake foot caused him constant pain, and the combination of painkillers and partying had left him so strung out he often couldn’t talk… He lost his house and left the WWF to enter the Betty Ford Center. He’d try rehab for his drug problem at least twice, but treatment never worked. […] In September 1992 he received ten years’ probation for a series of prescription forgeries. He was on his own—his wife had divorced him and taken custody of their daughters—and though he said he was clean, four months later he was picked up for possession of cocaine. 

On the morning of February 17, he was indicted, and he was certain that the next day, when he was to appear before the judge overseeing his probation, he’d be sent to prison. His attorney assured him that that wouldn’t happen, but Kerry was convinced it would. That afternoon, he went to his dad’s house and found the .44 Magnum he’d given Fritz for Christmas two years before. Then, after hugging his dad and telling him he had some thinking to do, he drove into the woods, sat against a tree, and put a single bullet through his heart.

Durkin also considered including Kerry’s daughters Lacey and Hollie in the script but didn’t in the end. “It’s a hard process when you love the family,” he says. “You want to do the story justice, you want to do them justice. It’s about making difficult choices to tell the best version of their story even though you’re making changes to it.”

In The Iron Claw, there is also a fleeting reference to another dark family detail—how Fritz seemingly skimmed his sons’ finances all those years while managing them. Kevin confronts Fritz with that accusation in the film, but Fritz responds thunderously, admonishing his son for not showing him proper respect. 

“That was definitely something we confirmed through research,” Durkin says, of Fritz’s financial mishandling. Asked whether he thinks Kevin still feels anger toward his father, who died in 1997, for the finances or the pressure he put on Kevin and his brothers, Durkin says no. 

“He recognizes his father was tough, but I think he felt a lot of love from his father despite his father’s sort of approach,” says Durkin, who has gotten to know Kevin and the surviving Von Erich family members through the filmmaking process. “He says, ‘My dad was tough, but all dads were tough in Texas back then.’ I don’t think he looks back at his dad now with anything other than admiration, honestly.”

Durkin says that he eventually determined that the film was about Kevin’s survival, as the only original Von Erich family member still standing. So he cut any story strands that did not serve that message. 

“These big wrestlers are in the ring performing acts of extreme emotion—pain, glory, injustice,” says Durkin. “But then they go back behind the curtain and have to follow these old-school ideas of male toughness—keeping their emotions inside, not talking about mental health, and not dealing with how depressing it is to spend 300 nights a year on the road. That was the real curse.” That became especially clear during Durkin’s long conversations with Kevin: “I think the reason Kevin survived and was able to start again was because of his access to his emotions. He speaks so beautifully about his pain and is so unafraid to talk about it.”

There were plenty of real-life Von Erich elements let out of Iron Claw. But in the end, it was one of Durkin’s invented scenes that struck actual family members the most. It comes after Kerry has shot himself, the final brother’s death to be depicted on-screen. Kerry is resurrected in a rowboat crossing a hazy stream. He gets out of the boat on the other side and is greeted by his dead brothers, each at the age they last saw him. They all embrace, including six-year-old Jack. 

By that point in the film, the family and audience have been through so much death and self-destruction that it’s a salve to see these brothers reunited. Unbeknownst to Durkin, it was also the same visual that Kevin used to describe to Doris when trying to comfort her after her five sons’ deaths. They had spent so much time visualizing that afterlife reunion that they were shocked to see it manifested on-screen. “It was moving,” says Durkin. “What they told me was that it’s brought them together, and I think it’s been quite cathartic.”