Brian Tyree Henry, Ryan Destiny on ‘Fire Inside’ Boxing and Emotional ‘Beyond the Spider-Verse’: ‘There’s Not Going to Be a Dry Eye in the House’

variety.com:

Marc Malkin Senior Editor, Culture and Events “The Fire Inside” has been years in the making. The Rachel Morrison-directed drama (in theaters now) tells the story of Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, the Flint, Mich., native who became the first American to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing.

Ryan Destiny stars as Shields alongside Oscar nominee Brian Tyree Henry as her coach, Jason Crutchfield. “I trained in 2020, our first go-round for three to four months,” Destiny tells me during a joint interview with Henry on this week’s “Just for Variety” podcast. “Then we stopped everything for two years, and I had to do it all over again for a second time.

But looking back, I am actually very happy that I got more time with it, and I think I grew as a person, and I would assume and hope that I do because it was such a long process. “Overall, it’s been like a five-year process getting this off the ground,” she continues. “So I’m very happy looking back now at it.

But it was intense. It was an intense world and very challenging for me, and in so many ways, I didn’t realize my body could do those things that it was doing.” Henry recalls razzing Destiny when she was eating her very strict and not so flavorful training diet. “She was irritable, but I loved it because I’d go up to her eating Cheetos, being like, ‘How’s everything?