“It really is a great story. You know, Jackie's story, it needed to be a feature film: what he went through and the things he accomplished. Every ballplayer who played with him, in the end, just through his character on and off the field, they all grew to respect him. And the color barrier was broken,” Merriman said in a phone interview from Los Angeles.

Taking its title from Robinson's number, which has been retired by every Major League Baseball team, “42” chronicles Robinson's historic 1947 rookie season with the Brooklyn Dodgers, which blazed the trail for other black players.

In the process, though, the ballplayer faced terrible prejudice. Merriman, who turned 30 on Wednesday, portrays one of Robinson's primary antagonists on the Dodgers, right fielder Dixie Walker.

“It's tough to watch, but I also think it's important to show how hard it was on him, how hard it was for him to play in that era. But to be honest, what Jackie went through and what we show in the movie, it was even worse for him (in reality),” he said.

“That's what made him such a great athlete and such a great man, is for him to be surrounded by all that hatred — and everyone wanting him to fail — and to have all that riding on his shoulders every time he was at the plate and to still come out with class and integrity.”

Although Robinson played himself in 1950's “The Jackie Robinson Story,” he has been written about far more often than he has been depicted on the big screen.

Brian Helgeland, whose credits include “A Knight's Tale,” “Payback” and the Oscar-winning screenplay for “L.A. Confidential,” wrote and directed “42,” with Chadwick Boseman playing Robinson, Nicole Beharie portraying the player's wife, Rachel, and Harrison Ford in the role of Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey, who deliberately sought out a black player to integrate the sport.

Merriman, who started acting when he was 8 years old, was thrilled to act opposite Ford in one scene, which unfortunately was cut from the final film.