Sydney Sweeney says her most powerful role yet will ‘save lives’
By Kelly Coffey-Behrens | Published: 2025-11-03 23:15:00 | Source: The Blast
Sidney Sweeney She steps into the ring, and in one of her most transformative roles to date. The “Euphoria” and “Anyone But You” actress stars as legendary boxer Christy Martin in the upcoming biopic “Christy,” which hits theaters November 7. Inspired by the true story of the woman who broke barriers in the male-dominated world of boxing, the film explores Martin’s meteoric rise, her hidden battles with identity and abuse, and her fight for survival after she was almost killed by her former husband and manager, James Martin. A sports drama and survivor’s story, Christie traces Martin’s journey from small-town West Virginia to global fame as the face of women’s boxing in the 1990s, a time when she appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, fought on pay-per-view cards promoted by Don King, and became the first woman inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Sydney Sweeney’s portrayal has already generated early awards buzz, with critics praising her physical transformation and emotional range in the role.
Article continues below ad
Sidney Sweeney says playing Christy Martin was a ‘no brainer’
In an interview with AARP Movies for AdultsSweeney said she felt an immediate connection to Martin’s story and saw the film as a creative challenge and a personal mission. “I wanted to confront Christy because she challenged me in new ways that I had never encountered before,” Sweeney explained. “Her story inspired me. I couldn’t believe I didn’t know who this amazing woman was, and I wanted the world to see it.”
The actress added that she believes Martin’s story can have an impact in the real world, saying: “I believe her story will save lives, and I needed to help facilitate that.”
Article continues below ad
Christy Martin speaks candidly about her pain relief
The real Christy Martin admitted that reliving her past, especially her violent marriage, during filming was painful. She revealed that she refused to interact with Ben Foster, who plays her abusive husband, during production. “I haven’t talked to Ben Foster,” she told Adult Films. “I couldn’t be in the room when he was writing the lines. I just couldn’t. And I stayed away from him the whole movie. I think he might have been happy, but it affected me. . . .”
Article continues below ad
Despite the emotional toll, Martin praised Sweeney’s performance and authenticity, saying the actress brought a new level of vision to her story. “It’s a lot different than what people expect from her,” Martin said. “She wanted to show that she had a wide range. I think that challenges her, and I think she cares about helping people, and this movie is going to help people in many different ways, in many different groups of people.”
Article continues below ad
Christy Martin wanted her story to be more than just a fight
While Christie doesn’t shy away from the brutality Martin endured, both in and out of the ring, her heart lies in resilience. “I wanted it to be an underdog story,” Martin shared. “Reaching survivors of domestic violence, reaching parents that have their kids come to them saying they’re gay or don’t quite fit into what the family thinks they should be.”
The film also chronicles Martin’s struggle to come out as gay in a conservative family and the personal freedom she fought for after leaving the ring.
Article continues below ad
“Christie” by Sidney Sweeney honors the boxer who brought women’s boxing to the mainstream
In the 1990s, Christy Martin became a household name, bringing women’s boxing to the mainstream. Under Don King’s guidance, she fought on major pay-per-view cards alongside legends like Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield, won the welterweight title, and inspired a new generation of female athletes to enter the sport.
Martin’s story is one of both triumph and trauma, and Christie aims to highlight the fighter behind the gloves, a woman who defied expectations, broke barriers, and survived the unthinkable.
Knockout round for Sidney Sweeney
For Sweeney, “Christie” represents a dramatic turning point in her career, a sharp departure from the glossy roles that made her a household name. The actress trained for months to embody Martin’s physical character, working with professional boxing trainers to capture every punch and move realistically. While the film delivers adrenaline and action, it’s the emotional heft behind Sweeney’s performance that gets the audience talking.
“Christie” hits theaters on November 7, bringing to life one of the most powerful stories in sports and one of the most courageous performances of Sidney Sweeney’s career.
(marks for translation) Sidney Sweeney
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
