When attempting to describe the story of the Von Erich family, now immortalized forever in Sean Durkin's movie The Iron Claw, it's hard not to immediately default to one noun above all others: Tragedy.

From the initial passing of Fritz Von Erich's first son, Jack Jr., to the series of suicides that left Kevin Von Erich an only child despite being the second of six, few families have experienced such devastating losses and lived to see their story told on the big screen, let alone done so while keeping the passion for wrestling burning long enough to inspire a pair of third-generation performers, Marshall and Ross Von Erich, to try their hand at the family business too.

Discussing the darkness surrounding the story of the Von Erichs and how he was able to marry it with an inspirational story of a traditional sports movie, Durkin noted that despite the tragedy, the core of the story he wanted to tell was of survival.

“It was a huge undertaking. The first thing I did was a lot of research to sort through and find the facts of the family and build a reliable timeline of their story. And what you're looking at is just this epic Greek tragedy. But it's so huge. It's never going to fit in a movie, and look, you always know that as a filmmaker, no biopic has ever fully showed the life of one person. Never mind a family like this, so you're never going to really be able to do that, so you have to make a choice of like, what's the core of this?” Sean Durkin asked Post Wrestling via Fightful.

“What's the core I'm interested in telling? But really Kevin and Kevin's story of survival and this notion of him? What did he have to do to sort of break the curse in order to move forward and survive? And that was a really exciting prospect and just Kevin and the way he speaks so openly and how sort of clear he is about his emotions in the bad times and the good times. He was really like a guiding light for finding it. And I think the heart that he has and how loving of a guy he is really is the thing that saved him. And that was really exciting for me to discover.”

Did Durkin accomplish his goal? Did he perfectly skirt the line between tragedy and triumph? Or did The Iron Claw play things too safe, holding back on the abuse at the heart of the story both from Fritz and by the brothers when it comes to drugs and alcohol? That, for better or worse, lies in the eyes of the beholder.

Holt McCallany reveals his motivation for The Iron Claw.

Sitting down for an interview with Vulture, Holt McCallany discussed how he embodied the brutal intensity of patriarch Fritz Von Erich in The Iron Claw. While one may wonder how he was able to embody such a brutally complex character, McCallany noted that he first needed to find empathy for the character, connecting his own familial experience to that of the famous father of Texas wrestling.

“I did see certain things that Fritz Von Erich had in common with my own father. They were men of the same generation. They were both born in the ’20s, and they both had the attitudes toward life and toward the world, and certainly toward families, that were characteristic of men of that era. The way in which they were different is that my father wasn’t a guy who was particularly interested in fatherhood. He was an actor who became a producer on Broadway. He won a Tony Award, and he was always jet-setting around and trying to make deals and set up new projects. He was all over the English-speaking world as a theatrical producer,” Holt McCallany revealed to Vulture.

“That’s not Fritz. Fritz was a family man. Fritz was a Texan. He found a way to make his own sons the stars of his organization. If he had been a little different — a little less provincial, perhaps, and with a little bit more foresight — he might have become Vince McMahon. But he was happy being the king of Texas wrestling, and that was never more true than when his sons Kevin, and Kerry, and David became the absolute rock stars of that sport in that state at that time. What is very sad about our film — and it is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions — is that that dynasty was very short-lived. Fritz made some questionable decisions as he was trying to maintain control of something that was going off the rails. But I always saw him as a guy who was a real family man, a man who was in love with one woman his whole life, who took tremendous pride in the success of his sons and would do anything to help them achieve that success.”

As an actor, it's important to find empathy for a character one portrays, as no one, not even the most mustache-twirling villain, is a one-note evil person with no complexity. With that being said, one has to wonder if Fritz's story really should be played as complex instead of down-right abusive, as he played a big role in the deaths of at least three of his children due to the pressure he put on them.