Inside the making of the Anthony Robles film ‘Unstoppable’

ANTHONY ROBLES DOESN’T SWEAR. But he did let out a “holy crap” as he and his mom drove to Jennifer Lopez’s Los Angeles home in 2021.

They were invited because Lopez was set to play Robles’ mom, Judy, in a biopic based on Anthony’s remarkable life. Robles was born without his right leg, yet rose to the top of college sports in 2011 as an undefeated national champion wrestler at Arizona State.

The dinner was an all-time highlight for Robles and his mom. Lopez peppered them with questions — mostly aimed at Judy — and showered Anthony with praise. “He is probably the brightest light of a person I have ever met in my life,” Lopez recently told ESPN. “So inspiring. Just a pure soul. So motivational.”

The hangout also signified something much bigger for Robles and his mom — the movie was actually going to happen, and they couldn’t believe it. Off and on, for almost a decade, Robles had gone through a constant series of stops and starts as Hollywood tried to turn his life into a movie.

A production company bought the rights to his 2012 book, “Unstoppable,” with the goal of making Robles’ life story into a movie. Excitement starts!

Then the project fizzles out (stop). Another company buys the rights (start). Then it fizzles out again (stop). Finally, Artists Equity, the company owned by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, bought the rights (start). Then COVID (stop), filming begins (start), then a writers’ strike (stop).

Robles certainly isn’t the first to experience the herky-jerky world of big-budget moviemaking. But now, at age 36 and 14 years after he won an NCAA wrestling title against all odds, the stopping is over and there’s nothing but excitement. His movie, “Unstoppable,” came out in limited theater release in December and now heads to a worldwide audience on Amazon starting Thursday, Jan. 16. Rising star Jharrel Jerome plays Robles, with Lopez portraying Robles’ mom, and both are great in the film.

The movie hits many traditional sports movie beats. But in this case — the same as in 2011 — it’s hard to not end up rooting for Anthony Robles to win, even if you already know he will.

It’s the story of a kid with a disability who refused to think that made him less than. Robles started wrestling in high school and got rag-dolled for his first year, then began a rapid ascent to the top of college wrestling at Arizona State. His 2011 national title season was a masterpiece — he went 36-0 and was the outstanding wrestler in all four tournaments he entered that year, including the NCAAs. When Nike president Phil Knight met Robles, he said that his NCAA title year was the most incredible athletic achievement he had ever seen.

That also brought along the hilarious conversation about how Robles’ disability was a big advantage. See, it turns out that being born without a leg was a huge advantage for Robles because he could wrestle at 125 pounds with the upper body of a bigger man since having one leg allowed him to weigh less and have the power of a 150-pound man. And that strength edge offset the challenges of a sport centered on balance and footwork, allowing Robles to join a long list of Division I star athletes with one leg.

Oh wait, Robles is the only person who has ever done it.

The movie captures how hard it was for Robles to start wrestling, let alone excel at it. Jerome’s performance is quite moving, as we see young Anthony Robles push past an abusive stepfather and constant doubters to reach the pinnacle of a sport that can break even the strongest athletes.

Jerome is a future Hollywood superstar, and he showcases an ability to portray the emotional interiority of Robles. There is a simmering inside Jerome the same as there is within Robles. Jerome’s wrestling is impressive for someone who never did the sport until 2019 as an adult actor training for movie wrestling. But he’s a newcomer to a sport that isn’t forgiving to newcomers. So when Affleck and Damon decided to produce the film as their follow-up to last year’s “Air,” they realized the movie wouldn’t work unless the wrestling scenes were dynamic and close to reality.

But Robles’ style is so impossible to mimic that they kept coming back to the idea that they probably needed an amazing athlete who could capture Robles’ movements and power, all on one leg. They eventually decided that there was only one person who could be a stunt double for the actor playing 22-year-old Anthony Robles: the 34-year-old Anthony Robles himself.

FOR ABOUT TWO HOURS, Anthony Robles watches 500 people reenact the same surreal scene from his life. They do it one time, and then two times, and then 25 more starts and stops, as he sits in one of those high-backed Hollywood movie set chairs. And yes, it has his name screen-printed on the back.

He’s on set in December 2023 for the final scenes of the movie about his life — the 2011 NCAA wrestling championships. That moment in 2011 was the culmination of the ultimate triumph of his life. His mom, Judy, sits beside him on her own chair. They’re both shaking their heads at the surreality of making a movie about Anthony’s life.

A big part of their emotions is how eerily accurate the set is. USC’s Galen Center on Dec. 21, 2023, has been transformed into March 19, 2011, at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center. The production team has an actual NCAA wrestling mat, with actual 2011 logos, and replica Flyers and 76ers banners hanging in the arena rafters. For those who were there, it’s movie magic, a transport back in time that is so on point that it is borderline scary.

That’s what is hitting Judy so hard. She worked her whole life, through toxic relationships, money trouble and countless other struggles, to help Anthony get in position for success. The actual NCAA title in 2011 was the beautiful final act of all that sweat and tears. To see it again, on a movie set in December 2023, feels so much like the first time that she melts two minutes into the shoot.

The fact that the cinematic re-creation had multiple stops and starts adds to the sense of wonder and gratitude that it’s finally happening. They couldn’t believe it the first time it happened, and now they can hardly fathom that the movie version has come to fruition.

Right after arriving at the Galen Center, Judy walks into the arena and out onto the floor, where the set for Anthony’s title match is ready. She goes through black curtains and onto a red carpet leading to the mat, the same way she did 12 years earlier. She starts crying and doesn’t stop for about five minutes. It was emotional back then, seeing Anthony go from a mocked little boy with a disability to an athlete who achieved the ultimate accomplishment in college wrestling, and now Hollywood is going to capture it.

Judy eventually settles into her chair alongside Anthony. He entered the arena that morning smiling from ear to ear, but the emotions are about to take him down when they start rolling cameras that morning. “I felt like I walked right back into the NCAA tournament,” Anthony says. “And to see my mom start crying, I always cry too. It breaks me.”

In this scene, where Robles used his crutches to run into the arena in 2011, three different actors pretend to be him. With 300 extras stationed in the crowd, an announcer says, “From Arizona State University… Anthony Robles!”

Then, as Robles and his mom watch, Jerome arrives. The announcer says the same thing, “From Arizona State University… Anthony Robles!” and Jerome comes bounding into the arena on crutches. His right leg is a green legging, with a green croc on his foot, so that they can edit out the leg in post-production. In the final cut of the movie, it’s unreal how flawless the edit is.

Anthony gets overwhelmed watching his mom. He sits beside Judy on their chairs behind two screens showing what is being shot, the crowd cheering… the red carpet… the booming announcer’s voice… Jerome does such a good representation of Anthony that Judy later says she sometimes can’t tell them apart from far away.

Jerome has become him from 12 years ago, and it is haunting in the best possible way. He can crutch and hop on one leg into the arena with the same ferocious power and energy that Robles does, and he has wrestled with Robles enough to be able to do a passable job mimicking him on the mat. Robles often wrestled from his knee, with such speed and power that the entire production team was taken aback the first time they saw him do it in person.

Robles and his mom cry together as Jerome enters the arena one time, then two times, then 10 times. He skips up the steps and onto the mat, then crutches over to his corner, where Don Cheadle, playing Arizona State coach Shawn Charles, claps and waits. The Robleses both laugh later because they found themselves so jetted back to 2011 that they got nervous about how Anthony would do in this difficult matchup against Iowa national champ Matt McDonough, played by former All-America wrestler Johnni DiJulius. Spoiler alert for the movie, but Robles, of course, wins.

They’ve already captured that sound, so the extras must all do actorly claps and arm raises and silent screams without generating any noise — it’s quite a strange scene to see 500 people going wild in total silence. Jerome puts on his headgear in the corner of the mat, and Cheadle does his best channeling of a wrestling coach. He hypes up Jerome in the corner, repeatedly saying, “Find a way to win.”

A half-hour later, Robles is sitting in his chair when Jerome sneaks up behind him and puts a chokehold around his neck. Jerome never wrestled but has caught the wrestling bug. It’s one of those sports where everybody has done some of the basic movement of grabbing ahold of someone else and trying to pick them up and grapple them to the ground. So they think they know the sport and could probably do it.

Well, they can’t. The best wrestlers grind away for a good 10 years before getting to the level where they are a Division I-caliber athlete. And to be as good as Anthony Robles is almost impossible. But Jerome has been training off and on for five years to get ready for this movie, and his eyes lit up recently when one of the former college wrestlers helping out on set told him he was about to the level of a decent Division III wrestler. “I stand taller, and I stand more confident now,” Jerome says. “This role helped me go from a boy to a man.”

Jerome gently wrestles around with Robles from behind, and Robles just sits there for a few seconds. But then he clamps down on Jerome’s wrists in the same way a dad might tolerate his first-grader for a little while, then latch onto the kid hard enough to signal “OK, I mean business.” Jerome taps out and starts laughing, and so does Robles. No use roughing up a civilian.

He tells Robles he’s done shooting that scene, which took about 90 minutes and will constitute roughly 15 seconds in the movie. But they’re moving on to shoot the scene again for another hour, with Robles now playing Robles.

“Unstoppable” does something that has rarely been done in movie history. The same wrestling scenes are shot with Jerome, then with Robles. They have to look as similar as possible so that in post-production any facial shot will be Jerome but many of the action scenes are Robles, who had to work incredibly hard to achieve the body he had 12 years ago.

It’s not that Robles isn’t in great shape — he has spent the past five years setting multiple Guinness World Records marks for pull-ups — but he needed to beef up his upper body and push his weight well past 150 pounds of almost pure muscle for chasing pull-up records. So when the movie came along, Robles had to drop some upper-body mass and also cut his weight down closer to 125.

Robles ends up looking very close to the same world-class athlete he was a decade earlier. For roughly an hour, he and DiJulius battle it out. It’s more fun and dramatic than the actual match, which was a 7-1 Robles wipeout in 2011. The movie version is much more high-scoring and back-and-forth, so it’s amusing to Robles that he has to let the Hollywood version of his nemesis, McDonough, have more success than he did in real life.

Before the scene, Robles feels nervous. He’s been practicing for about a month straight to nail the match as the script is written. He met with DiJulius for something like 100 hours of scripted wrestling. And yet, Robles feels butterflies on this night the same way he did back in 2011.

Think about that for a second. Robles did the unthinkable in 2011, with no script, with no ability to yell “Cut!” Every move he made, every counter he pulled out against McDonough, happened organically. It says something about the remarkable nature of the original that a dramatized version took a month of practice to nail.

For the first take, Robles hops out in the center of the mat, as spry as ever at age 34. He does something that you could call a handshake but that more closely resembles two people slapping each other’s hands away. Referee Angel Rivera — an actual NCAA wrestling ref — blows the whistle, and Robles and DiJulius collide.

They go at it for about 45 seconds, and it looks like an actual wrestling match to the untrained eye. They battle hard, fighting hands and cranking each other’s necks like a real rivalry.

The entire crew claps at the end, knowing how hard 45 seconds of nonstop action can be to nail the way they just did. Subsequent takes might have been a little better here or there. But for the most part, they crush it.

Robles and DiJulius do the same scene over and over for about an hour, until Robles is done for the day. He exits the arena floor and takes the elevator up to the second level of the USC arena. He wants to watch Jerome do more wrestling scenes from that final match.

ROBLES FINDS TWO seats in the last row of the lower bowl. All the extras are down below, and almost no one realizes the subject of the film they are fake screaming for is 10 rows behind them. For the next hour, Anthony and Judy watch as Jerome hops into the center of the mat to spar with DiJulius. Jerome, with his green leg flattened out on the mat behind him, drops down on one knee and battles DiJulius. He has to power into DiJulius and take him down, then work a complicated tilt for back points on one leg despite having two.

In the stands, a few hundred feet up, Robles and his mom again watch one of the most important moments of his life being played by actors. Jerome and DiJulius do it over and over again, cutting and starting over. DiJulius ultimately wrestles the same match something like 50 times over multiple full days of filming.

For the first five takes, Robles and his mom lean forward in their seats. There’s a funny thing that wrestling people do when they watch matches; they comport and lean their bodies into the position they want to see happen in the bout they’re watching. It’s usually a coach or parent straining to mimic what they hope their kid can do. Robles is tensed up as if he doesn’t know how things will turn out — like maybe this time Matt McDonough will finally defeat him for the national title. “It was hard watching the match the first time,” Judy Robles says. “And it’s still hard for us watching the movie version because you remember the tension so well from that day.”

Jerome and DiJulius do the scene something like 15 times. It’s mapped out to the second, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to replicate the match, especially the way Robles wrestles. Jerome’s wrestling is hard to fathom for an actor who did a crash course in the sport. When Robles tenses up watching, it’s partially because he’s reliving the match and partially because he cares about Jerome in a way where he is rooting for him to win.

After one of the takes, the crew is resetting and Robles leans back in his seat. He relaxes for a second, but then Jerome and DiJulius start messing around going live. DiJulius is a legitimate elite wrestler, so he can big-brother Jerome any time he wants. Just as Robles’ back hits his seat, he arches back up as the two horse around on the mat below. Jerome drops down and reaches for DiJulius’ leg, but the former Ohio State star sprawls out and applies pressure on the actor. Jerome hangs on to the leg, though it’s clear he isn’t going to advance the position. DiJulius has him squashed.

DiJulius eventually steps back, and Jerome is left alone on the mat, with Robles and his mom smiling up above. They look tired from a long day on set, but also ecstatic about what a wild ride it is to watch some of the most poignant moments of their lives happen all over again. Anthony keeps looking over at Judy, whose eyes are locked on the mat below as if she’s still sitting there in 2011, rooting for Anthony to go out with a bang in the NCAA finals. “My mom was my role model, and she taught me to believe in myself and have high expectations,” Anthony says.

“She never accepted anything than my best. As I get older, I’m amazed about that love. It’s a love you can’t put into words. But I understand it now.”

Down below, it’s time to shoot the scene again, and they do it multiple times as Robles watches. He can’t help but think these are some of the best stops and starts of his life.