The Canadian comedy Racewalkers, which opens in select theatres on Friday, July 10, is a big-hearted, familiar sort of sports movie underdog story built around one of the most unlikely Olympic pursuits.
Stars, directors, and writers (alongside co-writer Evan Landry) Phil Moniz and Kevin Claydon weave a comedy around the physically demanding, but sometimes silly looking sport of racewalking. Moniz stars as Will Lester, a physical therapist who wants to be taken seriously as a racewalking coach and trainer. Will is constantly rebuffed and denigrated by his sneering uncle Kurt (Greg Bryk), whoโs grooming his doofus son, Ched (played by Robbie Amell), for the next yearโs Olympics. Fate and chance put Will into contact with Matt Mckenzie, played by Claydon, a washed-up professional baseball pitcher who now umpires little league games and lives out of his van. Will sees great potential in Mattโs form and wants to train the former top round draft pick in a new sport. Matt is initially hesitant and skeptical, but as his friendship with Will grows and success starts coming their way, he sees racewalking as an opportunity to find a new path to greatness.
We were able to catch up with Moniz, Claydon and Amell during a recent stop in Toronto to promote Racewalkers and talk about their working relationship together, learning the demanding art of racewalking, how Robbie got involved, and what it was like for Phil to take being a player-coach to another level off screen.
Phil and Kevin, whatโs your working relationship like?
Phil Moniz: Well, we have, for good or ill, known each other since we were, like, two, so a lot of, at least the on-camera stuff, is pretty much based around me just being annoyed or frustrated with Kevin, so that’s not really an acting challenge. (Laughs) Weโve known each other our whole lives, basically, and we kind of got into collaborating on film projects because we’re both sort of independently working in the industry, and then we just wanted to make stuff that we liked, and sort of went from there.
Kevin Claydon: Yeah, the idea itself for this movie came from one of our best friends, Evan Landry, who’s also a writer and producer of this movie, and, he saw racewalking one day, watching a clip of it, and he knew we needed to do something with this, so we just put our heads together. But it was really him who came up with the core idea of this as a sports comedy movie
There seems to be a strange set of rules and regulations around racewalking. When I watch it, they seem like theyโre almost running, but they canโt. I think I would be too tempted to run after awhile of walking that fast.
Robbie Amell: All the respect to everybody in the race walking world that nobody tries to do that.
Kevin: Itโs all about the integrity of the sport.
Robbie: So there’s an interesting thing in race walking: thereโs no video replay, and you’re not being watched the entire time, so a lot of what puts you like on notice is your time versus your training times and your history of times. Because people will always notice if this guy is blowing his personal best out of the water out of nowhere. He’s going to have some people start to watch him, because they need to know if he is picking up a few steps here and there. So, it’s pretty, it’s pretty wild. It’s a 20 kilometre race, so there’s a lot of time unsupervised.
Kevin: But they do have judges that’ll sort of, like, give you paddles that give you penalties, and if you get enough penaltiesโฆ Thereโs an absurd rule that we didn’t put in the movie because we thought no one will believe it, but basically, if you get enough, if you enough infractions, then you have to go stand in like a penalty box.
Phil: If they’re doing a track race, then it’s a little bit easier to monitor than if you’re doing a road course thatโs spread out. We were told that a lot of times they’re also clumped together at certain parts of the race, and it becomes much more difficult to visually track everyone’s knees and feet, because you’re kind of just in a whole clump of racers, and thereโs usually some liberties taken here and there.
From the form you guys have to show out there, racewalking looks like hell on the hips.
Robbie: My hips and my knees took the brunt of the pain during the week long race walking gauntlet that we put ourselves through. I don’t understand how they can do 20k or 40k at a time. At the pace they’re moving, I find it’s much less tiring to run. It’s wildly impressive, and I’m the more you do it, the more you realize how impressive it is. From the outside it looks like you’re just walking to, like, tell someone off, like I’m gonna just kick down an office door, but youโre doing it while holding a fart.
Kevin: Robbie and I both played hockey growing up, so did a lot of the cast in our movie, and hockey players have notoriously tight hips, so it was a grind. We were so sore afterwards. It was brutal.
Robbie, how did you get involved?
Robbie: I had seen Kevin and Philโs work before, because they made a project called Short Term Sentence, and it was very funny, and it just made me want to do something with them. Jeff Chan, who’s one of the other producers on the project, he and I got their script for Racewalkers. We read it, and we loved it, and we had a meeting with them. We were essentially just like, โLook, we want to work with you guys. We don’t know if we can get this movie made, but we will help you try until we are on set, or the answer is no.โ And if the answer is no, we’ll give you everything back. We don’t want to step in the way. And less than a year after that dinner, we were on set.โ
How much did the shades help you get into the role of Ched?
Robbie: A ton. Theyโre ridiculous. I thought the character is pretty out there, and then it just happened that pit vipers and that style of shade just started to storm back into style. The summer we were filming, I was taking my son to a baseball game, and we were on a train, and everybody had these styles sunglasses on. I’m like, “Oh shit, maybe aren’t that out there?โ But they definitely worked for for the for the character.
Kevin: Did you have one of those eureka moments? I never asked you this, where you like standing in the mirror and you put the vipers on?
Robbie: The mohawk was step one. I was actually gonna get rid of the mohawk, but my wife was like, โNo, this guyโs name is Ched.โ And then I was talking to Evan, and he said thereโs a race walker whoโs, like, not quite as ridiculous as Ched, and not a bad guy, but like, you know, is a little out there Heโs a little wild, and is a fan favourite, and I think he puts on a Viking helmet if he’s close enough to know he’s going to win a race, so I’m like, all right, this is my guy. This is this is my new second favourite race walker, behind Evan.
One of your filmโs biggest scene stealers and MVPs who canโt be here today is Greg Bryk as Chedโs father and Willโs antagonistic uncle. What was it like being around the energy that he brought to the villain role here?
Robbie: Heโs the opposite of that person in real life. He’s is the most generous, kind person. He is. I cannot say enough great things about Greg.
Kevin: Heโs always the funniest guy in the room.
Phil: And he plays a lot of legitimate psychos in some of the projects that he works on. So, for him to do this, we were a really lucky that he was on board. And he never broke character once while we were rolling.
Robbie: But he was the person that would break everyone because he was so funny.
Kevin: He was like a rock, though.
Phil: But he always had such energy. As Robbie was saying, at this budget level, you’re moving quickly, working long days, and like there was there was a few times I can remember like Greg really keeping the energy up for everybody, and itโs great to have someone like that there to play off of when days get tougher and longer.
Kevin, which took a greater physical toll on you during Racewalkers: the actual walking or the fact that your character keeps smashing into and through tables?
Kevin: (laughs) Yeah, the tables were tough. I gotta say, it might be the tables. And when you’re also the writer, you question why you did that. Then you realize โI have to go through that table now because I helped come up with this.โ But we also had a great stunt team, as well, to help with some of it. We sort of split the duties on some of that stuff, and our stunt team is incredible. They make us actors look good. The thing with this movie that Phil and I cared a lot about, was that there’s got to be a lot of physical comedy in it. Itโs a really physical sport, and it looks silly. And as a sports movie, we had to be sure we were always going a step further, like all those great sports comedies in the 90s did. So there I was going through tables.
Phil, you play the role of a coach on screen, but as a star, director, and co-writer, youโre kind of like a player-coach on set. Did your characterโs trajectory impact how you saw the film as a director?
Phil: I mean, yeah, for sure. Kevin and I, as co-directors, are in a lot of these scenes, so you know we definitely had to lean on our team. You know, Kevin mentioned our co-writer and producer, Evan Landry, and he was behind the monitor a lot, especially when we had to move quickly, because you canโt look at every take in a situation like that. For sure, what it did is create like a team mentality, if I can merge the sports into a shooting of the movie, kind of as you’re asking. We had a really good team, and you know, you don’t really get it in the can without that. Everyone, cast, crew, and all that really got on a team mentality and kind came together just try to get our days.
Robbie: You guys set such a great tone from the beginning, and it was very clear that they had done their homework for their scenes together, which is such a dangerous part, because they’re not behind the camera to see what theyโre doing as directors. But you guys had done your rehearsing, and they never missed. We never went over because of unpreparedness. The budget wasn’t huge, and we had to really work within that, and these guys crushed it. The crew that we had punched well above our weight. We got lucky with timing, and people were available, and it was that little movie that had a lot of heart, and people just wanted to make it and have fun. It was just kind of a perfect storm of luck and timing.
Racewalkers opens in select Canadian theatres starting Friday, July 10, 2026.
