"A lot of people don't know Vinny and they are going to watch this movie and associate Vinny Paz with this portrayal of him," says Whiplash star Miles Teller, who portrays the boxer in the biopic Bleed For This. "So you just want to be truthful to that."
In 1987, 24-year-old Vinny Pazienza became the International Boxing Federation World Lightweight Champion. The American, born in Rhode Island, also won the World Light Middleweight title four years later, making him only the second boxer, after Roberto Durán, to be champion at both Lightweight and Light Middleweight world titles.
Weeks after his 1991 win, he was involved in a near-fatal car crash that turned his life story from one of sporting excellence into a triumph of human spirit.
Doctors told the fighter, whose neck was broken, that his boxing career was over and he would probably never walk again. Pazienza refused to accept this diagnosis and embarked on a remarkable – and risky – journey back to the ring.
“Vinny risked paralysis,” says Teller. “He started working out five days after breaking his neck, knowing that if he messed up, even in a small way, then he would be paralysed from the neck down.”
The film, written and directed by Ben Younger (Boiler Room, Prime), focuses on this incredible comeback. Pazienza is seen training in the basement of his parent's home wearing a medical device called a halo, a contraption that was screwed to his skull to protect his neck from further injury.
The boxer keeps the training secret from his family and partner – the first person to discover what he is up to is his trainer, Kevin Rooney, played by Aaron Eckhart.
Teller went to great lengths to look the part for the role.
“In order to pretend to be a boxer, you have to go through a training camp, which gives you some experience of what fighters put their bodies through,” he says. “It’s unparalleled, except for maybe an Olympic athlete. Just trying to cut weight – all these things are so unnatural.” The 29-year-old actor lost 9 kilograms for the role and proudly boasts that his body-fat ratio fell to 6 per cent. Yet he believes the benefits of this to his movie career went far beyond making him more believable in this one role.
Before his breakthrough in 2014's Whiplash, in which he played a young drummer studying under an abusive teacher, he was best known for supporting turns in Rabbit Hole and Footloose, and memorably playing himself in Project X – although he did get to play the romantic lead opposite Shailene Woodley in 2013's The Spectacular Now.
"I was always telling people that before I did Bleed For This, I was in funny-friend shape," he says. "I was always the funny friend in a movie."
Now, he is one of the most sought-after stars in Hollywood. In his next two films – war drama Thank You For Your Service, and Granite Mountain, about the Yarnell Hill fire in Arizona in 2013 – he again portrays real-life blue-collar workers. It is a section of society he clearly identifies with.
“I grew up in a small town in Florida with and like blue-collar guys, guys that don’t need any kind of praise and just do their job,” he says.
• Bleed For This is in cinemas now
artslife@thenational.ae
