DETROIT — When Claressa Shields first talked to Ryan Destiny, she immediately sized her up.

Shields, the Flint boxer known as "T-Rex" and boxing's GWOAT — that's short for Greatest Woman of All Time — wanted to know if Destiny, who hails from Detroit, was tough enough to play her in the big-screen story of her life.

"I'm like, 'Hey, you're playing me, good to meet you,' and she's like, 'Yeah, I'm so excited.' And I'm like, 'You ever been in a fight before?'" says Shields, recalling her first phone call with the actress. "When she said 'No,' I was like, 'A pushing war?' She's like, 'no, nothing.' And I'm looking at the phone like, huh? I knew she was a great actress, but this was something completely different. So I told myself she got the role for a reason, I'm going to trust it, that's all I can do, is just trust it.

"And she has to know that if I don't like it, I'm probably gonna snatch her up."

Thankfully, Destiny passed Shields' test with flying punches, and colors. Destiny plays the two-time gold-medal winner in "The Fire Inside," the story of Shields' rise from meager beginnings in Flint to Olympic glory, which opened Christmas Day in theaters nationwide.

Shields' approval wasn't the only obstacle the movie faced during its long journey toward theaters. Filming originally commenced in March 2020, just days before the COVID-19 pandemic halted all Hollywood production. During lockdown, the film was bounced from Universal Studios' slate and put into turnaround, and Ice Cube, who was set to play Shields' coach, Jason Crutchfield, exited the project.

But like a fighter mounting a triumphant comeback, the film eventually landed at Amazon MGM Studios and resumed production, with Oscar nominee Brian Tyree Henry ("Causeway") in the trainer role. "The Fire Inside" premiered in September at the Toronto International Film Festival to solid reviews — it currently carries a 95% "fresh" rating on movie review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes — and Shields, thankfully, hasn't had to snatch anyone up.

"Everything was perfect," says Shields, seated with Destiny and the film's director, Rachel Morrison, in a suite at Birmingham's Townsend Hotel in early November.

"I've watched the movie six times now, maybe seven, and I cry the same way every time. It's one of those things where it's like, when you see it, you get up and you're like, 'I'm about to go win some s—. I'm about to go tell my boss I quit, I'm about to leave my day job,'" she says. "It's one of those pick-me-ups, and I think everyone in the world needs that. And I feel like I'm the perfect person, I'm the perfect story, to give that."

Flint Strong

"The Fire Inside" is not the first time Shields' story has been told on film; the multiple world title holder was also the subject of 2015's "T-Rex: Her Fight for Gold." That documentary inspired Universal Pictures to acquire the rights to Shields' story for a big-screen drama, with a script by "Moonlight" Oscar winner Barry Jenkins.

In 2019, Morrison — the first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for cinematography for her work on 2017's "Mudbound" — was hired to direct the film, and Destiny, the 29-year-old singer and actress who starred on Fox's music business drama "Star" for three seasons from 2016 to 2019, won the role of the boxer. It's her biggest movie role to date.

"It's crazy because it wasn't like they were searching for someone from Michigan, that's just how it happened," says Destiny, a West Bloomfield High School graduate — she was Ryan Irons then, Destiny is her middle name — who didn't know much about Shields' story until she saw the film's script.

"I think it was meant to be that way," Destiny says. "It was very aligned and really special to me. I feel like a lot of my journey, personally, always tends to come back home in some way, and I love when it does. And I think it's such an honor to able to have those parallels."

Filming on "The Fire Inside," which once carried the title "Flint Strong," started on March 12, 2020, in Flint and was shut down just a few days later when COVID hit. But some of that initial footage survived the final cut of the movie, and shows Shields (played as a youngster by Jazmin Headley) jogging on the streets of Vehicle City. (When filming resumed in summer 2022, it was chiefly shot in Hamilton, Ontario, which doubles for Michigan and other locations.)

Shields trusted the filmmakers to tell her story and stayed away from the production during shooting.

"When I met with Rachel and I talked to her, she was very excited about it, and I was just like, 'OK, go ahead,'" says Shields, 29, who won Olympic gold in 2012 in London and 2016 in Rio de Janeiro. "I'm a boxer. I'm going to do my job. Rachel's a director, Barry Jenkins is a writer, Ryan Destiny is an actress; I'm not getting into none of that.

"I'm not going to cross those lines because that's like if Rachel was going to show me how to box. You can't show me how to box," Shields says. "I've been doing this for a long, long time, and it's my business. It's my job. I actually live this, and I don't want to step on nobody's toes and try to mess her up or mess Ryan up. I feel like if everybody would do their job it would turn out great, and it did."

Shields and Destiny didn't meet in person until after the movie was finished shooting, at the actress' birthday party in Los Angeles in January 2024.

"It was crazy because she saw the film right before that, and I was like, 'if she doesn't like this, it's going to be really awkward,'" says Destiny. "So I'm really glad she liked it."

Keeping it real

The trio has since spent quite a lot of time together, attending premieres and doing press. At the Townsend, Morrison and Destiny are both buttoned up and slightly reserved, while Shields plays the loose cannon, cracking the other two up with her off-the-cuff remarks.

Shields, for example, said the movie leaving Universal was "the saddest news" she received during the making of the movie, and expressed her disappointment over Cube dropping out. ("I was like, who the hell is going to play Jason?" Shields says.) She also said she was worried the movie was going to wind up getting dumped on a streamer like Netflix. It's the kind of raw, unfettered honesty that is usually buffed out of Hollywood types when they participate in junket interviews, where they're coached to accentuate the positive and leave out the rest.

But it's a reminder of the rawness and realness of Shields, the figure at the center of "The Fire Inside," a warrior who rose from nothing to overcome the odds and who has earned her GWOAT title in the boxing ring, where she carries an undefeated 15-0 record. Are you going to tell her what she can and can't say?

Morrison calls Shields the movie's "fearless leader," and says it was her spirit that inspired her to keep pressing forward when it appeared the movie was either down for the count, or, at the very least, headed to a streaming service.

"It was a refusal to admit defeat," says the first-time director, 46. "I was like, 'I'm not letting this thing go.' Some of it was blind stupidity: I didn't know what I didn't know. If I knew what a miracle it was to get a movie out of turnaround, during a pandemic, maybe I wouldn't have even done it, but I don't think I knew.

"But now we're getting the dream release, Christmas Day in wide release in theaters, and it feels like a fairy-tale ending to a long, hard-fought battle," Morrison says.

That fairy-tale ending isn't lost on Shields, who says the first time she saw the movie, she was able to separate herself from the story and get sucked in as a viewer.

"Before I watched it I tried to take myself out of it, because I didn't want to have any disappointment. And then as I watched it as it went on, I found myself being in it, a lot," she says. "I'm wrapped up in the movie, I'm feeling myself clenching my fist, I'm crying. And when I got done watching the movie, I was just shook. I kind of just sat still for a few minutes and I was like, 'whoa.'

"It's the highlights of my life, it's the downsides of it, and in the end, it's really a roller coaster. It's like, ' whoo!' We're going up, now we're going down. We're going up, we're going down," she says. "But in the end, we win though!"

Count it as one more knockout for the fighter from Flint.

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'THE FIRE INSIDE'

MPA rating: PG-13 (for some strong language, thematic elements, and brief suggestive material)

Running time: 1:49

How to watch: Now in theaters

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