Daughter of Wrestler Kerry Von Erich Says ‘The Iron Claw’ Left Out His Entire Family: “It Was Heart-Wrenching”

Lacey Von Erich says A24 didn’t just dramatize her father’s life — they erased her from it completely. In a preview for an upcoming episode of Hollywood Demons, the Investigation Discovery docuseries, she calls The Iron Claw inaccurate and emotionally devastating, pointing to the complete omission of her and her sister from the story. Her father, Kerry Von Erich, played by Jeremy Allen White in the film, is shown battling injuries and addiction, but not as a father or husband — a choice she says was deeply upsetting.

“My sister and I were not in the movie as my dad’s children and he didn’t have a wife or anything,” Lacey said in the preview. “And that was a really big part of my dad. So how he was portrayed in the movie is so inaccurate that it was heart-wrenching.”

The film, which dramatizes the rise and fall of the Von Erich wrestling dynasty, covers Kerry’s real-life motorcycle crash, the amputation of his foot, his painkiller addiction, and his eventual suicide. But it completely omits his wife, Catherine Murray, and their daughters. That choice didn’t sit right with Lacey — or with Kerry’s brother Kevin Von Erich, played by Zac Efron’s character in the film. While Kevin endorsed the film publicly, he’s also spoken out to say that his brother was much more of a family man than the movie showed.

“Kerry in the movie was not a family man, but in real life he was,” Kevin said.

Lacey, meanwhile, says the family was never contacted during the development of the A24 project. She remains frustrated that such major parts of her father’s story — his marriage, his daughters, his role as a father — were entirely left out of a film that claimed to honor him. For her, it wasn’t just a missed detail. It was personal.