Sean Durkin will square off with Zac Efron for a home­spun wrestling tragedy

Sean Durkin qui­et­ly dropped one of the ear­ly pandemic’s finest films dur­ing the dry sea­son of stream­ing-only releas­ing in 2020, though press­ing world events put some­thing of a ceil­ing on the num­ber of eye­balls that The Nest ulti­mate­ly reached. But writer/​director Sean Durkin (of 2011’s Martha Mar­cy May Mar­lene) is back, and it looks like he’s not going to leave us hang­ing for anoth­er nine years before com­plet­ing a follow-up.

Dead­line broke the news that the indie stal­wart has locked in his next fea­ture project with Iron Claw, an A24-front­ed drama­ti­za­tion of the sad events that befell the Von Erich fam­i­ly of wrestlers. And for the lead role, he’s wran­gled an actor with the range and rip­pling wash­board abs that the gig requires: new­ly mint­ed seri­ous thes­pi­an Zac Efron.

The Von Erichs were a Tex­an clan that treat­ed pro wrestling like a fam­i­ly busi­ness, hand­ed down from father Fritz (who was large­ly respon­si­ble for resus­ci­tat­ing the sport dur­ing the ​’60s in Japan, where he earned the nick­name that gives the film its title) to his six sons. But he’d live to see enough accu­mu­lat­ed mis­for­tune to make the Tenen­baums feel lucky befall his brood of brawlers, to the point that wrestling fans mur­mur about the Von Erich ​“fam­i­ly curse” to this day.

It’s not yet clear whether Efron will por­tray Fritz him­self or one of the sons, but in either case, this gig will push him far­ther into the dra­mat­ic, explorato­ry phase his career seems to have entered with roles like a charm­ing Ted Bundy in Extreme­ly Wicked, Shock­ing­ly Evil, and Vile as well as a vap­ing rehab dropout in The Beach Bum. Soon enough, Efron’s swoop-haired days as a Dis­ney Chan­nel crush object will be a faint mem­o­ry, over­writ­ten by a grow­ing list of well-fet­ed auteur col­lab­o­ra­tions. Watch your back, Robert Pat­tin­son.

And as for Durkin, this is more proof that he’s some­one heavy­weight actors will climb over each oth­er to work with, The Nest hav­ing giv­en Jude Law and Car­rie Coon some of the meati­est writ­ing either one has seen in a good while. Giv­en the sub­ject mat­ter, he’ll need a large ensem­ble cast, and the A24 impri­matur com­bined with Durkin’s own cachet could lure in some major names.