Dwayne Johnson is one of the biggest movie stars in the world, in that he is both incredibly famous and physically massive. Two of The Rock’s upcoming movies are arriving this month, and each one could be a big hit. Johnson is one of the most in-demand stars today, but The Rock says that wasn’t always necessarily going to be the case, and he had to fight against conventional wisdom to get here.
Dwayne Johnson is far from the first to make the jump from professional wrestling to acting, though is certainly the most successful. In the early 2000s, he made the shift from full-time wrestler to full-time actor but he says that rather than being embraced as the star he already was, people told him he would need to change if he wanted to be a Hollywood leading man. Johnson told EW…
‘If you wanna be a leading man, you’re too big; you can’t go to the gym, you have to lose weight, you gotta go on a diet.’ And if you don’t know any better, then you buy into it, so I started to question myself then. Some of those films at the time I was making, I think, reflect that. And then a moment came where I said, ‘Excuse my language but f— that, I’m not doing this anymore, I’m gonna do myself. And if I fail, then I can fail being me.’
Johnson talks about questioning himself, and how those doubts were reflected in the movies he was making at the time. It’s certainly true that Dwayne Johnson’s early career has a wide variety of films and roles. He appeared in family comedies like The Game Plan and The Tooth Fairy. He was in more serious dramas like Southland Tales and Gridiron Gang. He made smaller action movies as well.
His choices are sort of all over the place. This could be the case of a new actor just trying different things to see what works, but it seems for Johnson this was him not being sure about his role in Hollywood more broadly. In the end, he decided to be more true to himself, and when he did that, big things started to happen. Johnson continued…
A funny thing happened when I said, ‘Ah, f— all this’: career went like this [points up]. I became acutely aware of the power of being authentic and being real.
Starting with Dwayne Johnson’s appearance in 2011’s Fast Five, there’s a clear shift in his movies and the sorts of roles he’s taking. The movies aren’t all massive hits, but they certainly do make it clear who Dwayne Johnson wants to be as an actor.
It appears to have all worked quite well. Johnson’s Christmas movie Red One is looking to have a surprisingly solid opening weekend, and Moana 2 is looking to be as successful as the first film. Clearly, saying “Fuck it” was the right decision for Dwayne Johnson.
