Female boxing icon Christy Martin felt that Sydney Sweeney had the required “competitive spirit” to play her in the biopic Christy.
Christy Martin thinks Sydney Sweeney did a “great job” portraying her in Christy.
The 57-year-old former boxer and domestic abuse survivor is played by the Euphoria star in the new biopic and believes that Sydney had the “competitive spirit” needed to bring her to life on the big screen.
Christy told Flickering Myth: “She did a great job. What’s interesting that maybe a lot of people don’t know is that she actually has an MMA background from when she was a teenager. So she already has that competitive spirit. The boxing, she enjoyed.
“I actually feel like she had fun with this role because it’s so out of character for her that it was challenging, but yet fun for her to be something that wasn’t the norm.”
Martin is a trailblazer in the boxing world but was also the victim of an attempted murder attempt by her abusive husband Jim Martin and explained that she wanted the biopic to cover all aspects of her story.
She explained: “From the beginning I said, ‘This movie has to be promoted as a life movie, not as a sports movie.’
“I think that there are so many different groups of people that this movie can give strength and hope to and then help that they know that people are out there to support them, whether it be with domestic violence, sexuality, or I refer to myself as the ultimate underdog.
“There’s nothing special about this coal miner’s daughter from a very small town in southern West Virginia. So if I can do it, if I can get up off the floor, if I can make it to the top of the boxing world that no other woman has ever done before, they can also do whatever their dream is.”
Although she didn’t want to be a sports movie, Christy hopes that the biopic will resonate with modern female pugilists.
She said: “I really don’t want this to be looked at as a sports movie, but because boxing obviously is a backdrop, I think that it makes a big statement that bringing women’s boxing to the forefront will also get people’s attention so that these fighters who are fighting now will remember, ‘Hey Christy Martin had a lot to do with why we have some of the paydays. We’re getting some of the exposures we had here, 25, 30 years later. Somebody else put in a lot of work to make this possible for us today.'”
Christy recalled how she immediately trusted director David Michod and his writer wife Mirrah Foulkes to tell her story.
She explained: “It was the comfort and the trust they gave out. I actually had met David on a Zoom call a couple of years before filming, and I really liked him as a person.
“I liked the conversation. I liked that he realised my story wasn’t a sports story. It’s a life story, and that’s the way it needed to be put out there. It needed to be promoted as a life story. That’s what really drew me to David.”
Martin continued: “And then Mirrah, his partner, is a great writer. We sat for hours and talked as she came and visited in Florida; she got me. She could relate to what I was telling her, or she would listen with a really close ear to make sure she was getting exactly what I was telling her about the emotions, the events. Everything was right on.”
‘She did a great job’: Christy Martin praises Sydney Sweeney’s portrayal of her in Christy biopic
