“Christy” tells the life of Christy Martin, the groundbreaking boxer who rose to national prominence in the 1990s and became the first female fighter to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Her impact on the sport is widely remembered. What far fewer people know is the private history that ran alongside it: years of escalating control and abuse from her trainer and husband, Jim Martin, violence that culminated in a near-fatal attack. The film brings both of these realities into view instead of letting one overshadow the other.
The project began for director David Michôd not with boxing fandom, but with literature. While researching the sport, he found himself drawn to the writing of Joyce Carol Oates and A. J. Liebling, who describe a kind of poetry in movement, violence, ritual, and identity. In “Christy,” the ring is not simply a site of competition. In the film, the ring is the one place where Christy can act without interference or fear. It’s where her instincts and identity are clear. That clarity stands in direct contrast to what she endures outside of it, and that contrast shapes the emotional center of the film.
Sydney Sweeney steps into the role of Christy with a level of physical and emotional commitment that defines the film (and maybe her career thus far). She trained for months to learn Christy’s exact fighting style, gained 35 pounds to reflect her strength, and performed fight sequences drawn from real bouts. The role demands both physical strength and emotional clarity. It isn’t a performance built around transformation for its own sake. Sweeney’s focus is on understanding Christy and honoring the reality of her experience.
Ben Foster approaches the role of Jim Martin through the lens of insecurity and control rather than villainy. The film’s potency rests on viewers understanding how manipulation can masquerade as mentorship, stability, or even devotion. Katy O’Brian, who plays Christy’s first great love, Lisa Holewyne, offers an emotional counterweight. Her presence in the film represents possibility: who Christy might have been allowed to be in a life without fear. Their performances keep the film grounded in lived emotional stakes rather than generic narrative beats.
The film had its world premiere in the Special Presentations section at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival on September 5, 2025. It was released theatrically on November 7, 2025, by Black Bear Pictures.
Awards Focus first spoke with Michôd and O’Brian, and then separately with Sweeney and Foster, about portraying real lives, navigating the physical and emotional demands of the story, and collaborating with Christy and Lisa throughout the process.
Awards Focus: The film holds both the brutality of boxing and the intimacy of Christy’s personal experience. David, how did you think about balancing those elements as director?
David Michôd: My introduction to the beauty of boxing came more from the books I was reading than anything else. I wasn’t really a boxing aficionado before I started this. I knew that there had been a lot of great writers who had written beautifully about boxing. I read Joyce Carol Oates’s book and A. J. Liebling’s book “The Sweet Science.” It’s so strange that a sport that is brutal at its core can lend itself to poetry so easily. That was the way in for me. The central fight in the film, Christy versus Deirdre Gogarty, became really important. Given everything going on in Christy’s life, that moment was the clearest representation of the ring as Christy’s spiritual home. That was the emotional center of the movie for me.
Awards Focus: Katy, how did you approach playing Lisa, especially knowing she’s a real person who is still with us?
Katy O’Brian: This was the first time I’ve played someone who is real and still alive, and sometimes even on set. I had a short time to figure out who she was. When we talked, we were both trying to figure out what I needed to understand. She’s just such a bright, caring, empathetic person. I really tried to bring that energy to set. I told her I wasn’t going to look like her or stand like her, and she didn’t care. We found we had a lot of strange little things in common. At the end of the day, she said she felt represented by me playing her. She was excited about that. She was there to be of service to Christy, and that felt like the character to me.
AF: Boxing stories often come with a familiar narrative arc: adversity, training, triumph. How did you avoid familiar sports movie patterns?
Michôd: I didn’t see a boxing film in my future, even recently. I usually associate contemporary boxing films with being an excuse for a young male actor to get a six-pack and flex. This felt totally different. With a woman at the center, I was excited about that alone after making a bunch of movies about men. But the ring is just a small stage. The real story is everything outside of it. What Christy endured in her life is almost unimaginable. The more research I did into coercive control relationships, the more I saw patterns, almost like a playbook. Mira and I started feeding that into the script. I’ve never made a movie that is so emotionally affecting. Seeing audiences deeply moved has been incredibly rewarding.
AF: Now that the film is about to release, what has been most meaningful in hearing directly from Christy and Lisa?
O’Brian: After the Toronto premiere, Lisa came up to me and gave me a big hug and said, “We’re family now.” That was huge for me.
Michôd: I genuinely feel like Christy and Lisa will be in my life forever now. Everyone involved in the film was there for the right reasons, and it has stayed that way.
AF: Many people have asked about the physical transformations you both underwent. I’m curious about the emotional part afterward. What was it like to return to yourselves when filming ended?
Sydney Sweeney: I don’t like to take my character home with me. I go into Christy when it says “action,” and I come back to being myself when it cuts. Maybe unknowingly some weight comes home. But when we wrapped, it was a shock. I had gained 35 pounds. I had to start “Euphoria” seven weeks later. I had to mentally switch very quickly. I had to be strict with myself. It was a big shift.
Ben Foster: Work for me is like having a bird trapped in your house. It flies around and breaks things that are precious to you. It takes a while to come back. But however you come up or come down, Sidney is such an incredible partner. She lifted everyone.
AF: Ben, how did you approach Jim without turning him into a simple villain?
Foster: One of the great questions of the film is how someone as powerful as Christy Martin ends up in a relationship like this. There had to be qualities of Jim that were somewhat charming or paternal. In studying how these relationships happen everywhere, every day, I saw insecurity and male fragility. When unchecked, that can become dangerous. It couldn’t just be the monster. It had to be complicated.
AF: Sydney, had you ever imagined playing a boxer?
Sweeney: Yes. I grew up kickboxing and grappling. I was meeting with Ronda Rousey to develop her story. Then I read Christy’s script. I couldn’t believe I didn’t know who she was. I got on a Zoom with David an hour after reading the script on a plane and told him I would lose myself to this. I wanted to bring her story to life. I felt an urgency to tell it.
AF: Now, was that a hard sell? Because the world knows you in a very different context going into this.
Sweeney: David had seen “Reality,” so he knew me as an actor and not just the version of me that people see online or think they know. He understood that I like to completely disappear into roles. I think that helped. He wasn’t looking for the person I am on red carpets. He was looking for someone who would commit. And I told him, you won’t see me in this. You’ll see Christy.
AF: How did you approach Christy’s specific boxing style?
Sweeney: Christy was with us a lot. She was on set many days, and I worked with her during prep too. I spent about two and a half months training with a boxing coach and a weight trainer. I gained 35 pounds. I studied all of her fights. Every fight in the movie is one of her real fights. It’s not made-up choreography. I had to learn how to box like Christy, not just how to box.
And then when we shot the fights, we connected. I wanted to actually be hit, and I wanted to hit. I would ask if we could connect because so much of Christy’s story lives in what happens in the ring. I didn’t want to be thinking about pulling punches or protecting angles for the camera. I wanted the audience to feel what she felt. I didn’t want any part of it to be fake.
AF: Your characters have a violent, emotionally heavy dynamic. Did you need distance from each other off screen to sustain that?
Sweeney: No. I love Ben.
Foster: We trusted each other. We knew what was at stake. There was care in going hard.
AF: Sydney, you got emotional during the standing ovation in Toronto. What was going through your mind at that moment?
Sweeney: I had seen the film before, but I had never seen it with Christy. She was in front of me. To feel the audience reacting, and then to see Christy stand afterward, still here, still claiming her story, was overwhelming. I get goosebumps thinking about it.