In 2003, Anthony Robles finished his freshman year of high school wrestling in last place. “I remember sitting in my bedroom that night just crying and debating whether or not I wanted to wrestle anymore,” he tells Vanity Fair. “If someone would’ve walked in that day and told me, ‘Hey, one day they’re going to make a film about your life’—never in my wildest dreams.”

But this September, Robles will attend the world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival of the movie inspired by his life. Unstoppable chronicles Robles’s meteoric rise, how he became a top-tier college wrestler despite being born without his right leg. Overcoming physical limitations and a challenging family life, Robles proved those who underestimated him wrong to become a champion wrestler and a national star.

The film, starring When They See Us breakout Jharrel Jerome as Robles and Jennifer Lopez as his mother and greatest advocate, Judy, is an uplifting sports drama that doesn’t shy away from the hardships that Robles faced. Directed by William Goldenberg—an Oscar-winning editor known for his work with Michael Mann, Paul Greengrass, and Ben Affleck—Unstoppable follows Robles as he becomes a high school wrestling star, but struggles to find a college that will recruit him, despite his outstanding record. He ends up walking on to Arizona State University’s team, where he has to prove himself once again.

The film had its own challenging journey to the big screen, with delays in development, especially when COVID brought Hollywood to a halt. Jerome had signed onto the project in 2019, just after he won an Emmy for his performance in When They See Us. It was exactly the sort of challenging role he was looking for, one that would demand he transform physically and mentally to play Robles. “I think it’s so special when an actor gets to portray a real-life person, the challenges that come with that and the justice that needs to be done,” says Jerome, who started to train immediately.

But the project couldn’t quite get off the ground for several years, stalled by the pandemic and different teams of filmmakers shuffling through. Then Goldenberg showed the script to Affleck while they were making their 2023 film Air, and Unstoppable finally gained momentum. Affleck and Matt Damon signed on to produce through their production company, and the film sprinted into production as an Amazon MGM project.

With a supporting cast that includes Bobby Cannavale, Michael Peña, and Don Cheadle, Unstoppable is an underdog story that is centered on a character who is so determined, he seems more like a work of fiction. Jerome knew immediately that Robles was a larger-than-life figure, someone who deserved to have his story told on the big screen. “Before you even meet him, you can see the confidence and the fight that he has in him—just on YouTube looking at his wrestling videos, just watching his interviews,” he says. “And then when you meet him, you see that light and you have no choice but to go, ‘I want to tell your story.’”

After Goldenberg won the Oscar in 2013 for editing Argo, he was approached by various agents, managers, and producers about possibly directing. “I don’t think I felt ready before then. I don’t think I felt in control of the medium enough to want to direct,” he tells Vanity Fair. “But then I couldn’t find anything I was interested in, and I also was very busy, so I didn’t have the time to really look for the things I wanted.”

Then in 2018, Goldenberg’s friend, producer David Crockett, brought him the story of Robles, based on Robles’s 2012 book Unstoppable: From Underdog to Undefeated: How I Became a Champion. “I loved the story,” says Goldenberg. “But the thing that really sealed it for me was meeting Anthony.”

Goldenberg spent a few days with Robles in Arizona, touring ASU with him, meeting his coaches and his family, including his mom, Judy. “There’s great athletes, and then there’s special people—there’s what makes somebody a champion,” says Goldenberg, comparing Robles to Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky. “After I met him I felt like it was a story that I had to tell.”

When I hop on a Zoom with Robles, I quickly understand what Goldenberg is talking about. Robles has an incredible light to him. He emits positivity in a way that never rings false, and that makes you want to remain close, hoping some of that light may rub off on you. Robles says he’d been approached about making his story several times before, but he wanted to make sure he had the right partners—people who would protect his family, even when the darker parts of his journey had to be included. “I knew that in order to tell my story fully and honestly, those things needed to be told, but they needed to be told in a delicate way,” he says.

A central part of Robles’s story is his relationship with his mother, whom he calls his hero. The film reveals that Judy’s husband (Robles’s stepfather) was verbally and physically abusive toward her. The role needed someone who could capture Judy’s strength. Lopez brought her authentic maternal instincts to the role, and also uses it to showcase more dramatic acting abilities that we’ve seen previously in films like Selena and, more recently, Hustlers.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that Lopez is married to Affleck, though Goldenberg swears that didn’t have much to do with her casting. “She had to be somebody who’s lived a life, and I felt like Jennifer was one of the few actresses who could play the part,” he says. “I think that she was right for it, and it was also serendipity that he happened to be married to the person we sort of wanted all along anyway.”

Robles says Lopez spent hours talking to his mother ahead of filming. “She really made us feel comfortable and safe,” he says, adding with a smile that his mom has taken to using J.Lo memes in their family group chat.

It wasn’t always easy for Robles to revisit those darker moments. But while preparing for the film, Jerome would ask him many questions about his life on and off the mat. “He’d ask about wrestling—getting introduced to it, how it made me feel when people were staring at me growing up, how it made me feel and when people will treat me differently,” says Robles. “To be honest, it was something that was difficult to talk about at first just because I got so used to putting up that shield wall in my own personal life, just not letting those things get to me.”

Jerome’s greatest challenge was the physicality that the role would demand. He readily admits that before making this movie, he never went to the gym. But leading up to filming, he spent four or five months training every day, lifting weights to mirror Robles’s incredibly strong upper body. “The shoulder width, the strong back and the idea that his posture is almost like a martini glass—so upright and then it slims down towards the bottom,” says Jerome. “His posture is immaculate. My posture sucks.”

Then he’d practice wrestling, training with Robles and his former ASU coach Brian Stith for several hours. And in the afternoon he’d work with movement coach Allison Diftler on capturing Robles’s everyday movements. “That required me bringing in crutches and we would just crutch around everywhere. We would crutch in circles. I’d run and crutch. I’d crutch upstairs, downstairs,” says Jerome. “I practiced getting in a car, out of a car—all the things to make the crutches seem like they are a pair of legs.”

The movement work helped Jerome understand how a man who had been without his right leg for his entire life would carry himself. “That was the biggest challenge for me, making sure the crutches didn’t seem like I had just sprained my ankle two weeks ago and I’m wobbling on them—it had to be very fluid,” he says.

Robles’s story is about sheer determination, and his tireless drive to be great, despite any perceived limitations. Robles not only serves as one of the producers of Unstoppable, but can be seen in the movie as Jerome’s stunt double for the wrestling scenes.

Although Goldenberg says Jerome got so good at wrestling that other actors in the cast—most of whom were actual wrestlers—assumed he too had been a wrestler growing up, he knew he had to enlist Robles for some of the wrestling scenes. “The idea was, I can’t make the movie unless Anthony does the more difficult parts of the wrestling,” says Goldenberg. First, that’s because of “how good he is. And second of all, because of the fact that he’s missing his leg on the one side and also has no hip on that side. When he’s on that side down on the mat, there’s no way that that can be done with visual effects.”

So Robles became Jerome’s stunt double for his own story, choreographing and then performing the wrestling scenes alongside Jerome. In that way, he got to relive his incredible rise, becoming a college wrestling star after those humble beginnings as the worst wrestler on his high school team.

Now 36, Robles is married and has an 18-month-old. He finds joy in the idea that someday his son can watch this film, which Amazon MGM Studios will release for a select theatrical run in December after its TIFF debut. “This has given me an opportunity to leave a legacy for my son, something we’re going to watch together,” he says. “And for me to spread that message of what my mom always told me: ‘It doesn’t matter what you don’t have, it matters what you have—you focus on your strengths.’”