Dwayne Johnson, better known until recently as the Rock, is a touch-y guy. A hand on the shoulder, a guiding elbow tap — moving across a studio here for his next movie, he used his 1.9 metre frame as a form of leadership. Not that you’d be likely to miss him otherwise.
Johnson made sure of that, hoisting a three-metre-ladder around scurrying crew members and clowning with a make-up artist, flinching when she patted his brow. As any fan who has followed him from the wrestling ring to the big screen knows, Johnson is, above all, a goofball.
The entertaining thing came naturally, early on. “I used to think I was Elvis, Sam Cooke,” he said. “I’d perform Richard Pryor monologues, like softly, because my mum didn’t know I was listening, sneaking the tapes, at the time. I was nine.”
Now Johnson, 43, is gliding on monster waves of attention, thanks to an impressive run at the box office (as part of the Furious 7 cast) and winning appearances in a televised lip-syncing battle and the White House Christmas celebration.
As a wide-reaching, multiethnic celebrity at a time when audiences crave diversity, and a keen user of social technology amid a fast-changing media industry, he should be the four-quadrant hero of our time, appealing to old and young, male and female alike. Yet he may be the oddest superstar we have, a known quantity whose accomplishments — box-office champ of 2013, four-time host of Saturday Night Live — are a continual surprise. Unlike the sequels and franchises he has excelled in, his next film, San Andreas, opening on Friday, is his first top-lining role in a big-budget original story, so “the stakes are higher”, he said. But along with his HBO series, Ballers, debuting in June, it could at last cement his status as a highly bankable leading man.
Already, “in terms of consumer appeal, he’s in the league there with Brad Pitt,” said Henry Schafer, a spokesman for Q Scores Co, which measures celebrity likability. Since the company began tracking him seven years ago, Johnson has maintained a Q score that’s consistently way above average, topping Tom Cruise, Mark Wahlberg and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the earlier paragon of muscle-bound crossovers.
Johnson “established a foothold and held on to it” — an uncommon path, Schafer said. “Apparently he’s always had a strong emotional bond with consumers.”
That is, with the consumers who know him; Johnson still does not quite have Pitt’s name recognition, and his greatest successes on screen have come in ensemble films. Last year’s Hercules, directed by Brett Ratner, was perceived as a flop in the United States. But it still earned more than $170 million (Dh624 million) overseas. His allure has grown global.
Getting into Hollywood
“Nowadays you’re not going to be a movie star if you don’t have international appeal,” said Jeanine Basinger, chairwoman of the film studies department at Wesleyan University. “I love the Rock,” she added. “He’s got the kind of chops that people take for granted. He’s on a trajectory, and it’s upward. That’s called brains, hard work and a realistic view of the business.”
To hear Johnson tell it, this moment is the culmination of several years of fighting just to get Hollywood to accept him in all his rippling, jokey glory. The battle entailed switching his management team entirely and even negotiating a return to the WWE ring every now and then.
“I am going to take a crack at this,” he said of his A-list career goals, “and I have to be me, I have to be me.”
“Getting into Hollywood,” he added, “I learned that lesson the hard way.”
In 2004, after a sold-out match at Madison Square Garden, Johnson quietly walked away from wrestling, having made inroads into acting, with the support of Vince McMahon, the WWE impresario. It was McMahon who cajoled Lorne Michaels into letting the Rock, as he was then billed, host SNL in 2000. Expectations were not high — he was still reciting a catchphrase (“Do you smell what the Rock is cooking?”) — but he thoroughly charmed. “He has a wonderful sense of timing, he has an innate theatricality, and because he projects strength, the audience kind of relaxes with him,” Michaels said. “He could do nuance, he could do subtle, he could do big and broad.”
As soon as he was introduced to non-wrestling audiences, doors began to open. (After his appearance on SNL in March, Johnson gushed that he had received a note from Steven Spielberg, whom he’s never met, praising his character work.) As he stormed the entertainment industry, moving from bare-brawn parts (The Scorpion King) to ones requiring a deft comic touch (Get Smart), Johnson shed his wrestling name, if not his swagger. Ever the promoter, McMahon chalked up his ease on camera to his experience on the mat. In wrestling, “you’re learning body language, crowd psychology,” he said. “The Rock is really good and was taught to know his audience.”
But even as his fan base was expanding, Johnson, a third generation wrestler and the only child of a black father and a Samoan mother, felt pushback from the film industry. The superstars he admired — Pitt, George Clooney, Will Smith — did not have his carved 250-pound-plus physique, and he was advised, he said, to slim down to look more like other leading men. Over a few years, he did. “If you don’t know any better, then you buy into that” stuff, he said, cursing. “But it never felt great to me. Physically, it didn’t feel great at all.”
‘Optimism and hope’
That advice was part of the reason he left Creative Artists Agency, defecting to WME in 2011 after a high-octane meeting with its chief, Ari Emanuel. Sitting in an office on the set here, alternating sips of pink antioxidant water and a caffeinated drink, Johnson inveighed against the “cynicism” he felt curbed his ambitions at CAA, which also balked at a return to wrestling. “It’s everywhere, whether you’re in Hollywood or not, just cynicism,” he said. “But you get so much further with optimism and hope.” Yes, the man whose signature move was a chokehold body slam really talks like this. He climbed back into the ring that year.
In San Andreas, for which he earned a reported $12 million, Johnson plays a Los Angeles search-and-rescue specialist, a family man going through a divorce. When most of California is hit by an earthquake, he sets out to save his soon-to-be ex-wife (Carla Gugino), his daughter (Alexandra Daddario) and a few others. (The distributor, Warner Bros, changed the marketing after the Nepal earthquake, highlighting relief efforts.)
Shooting in Australia, Johnson trained with search-and-rescue teams and learned to rappel out of helicopters, no mean feat at his size. He also cries on screen. “Sometimes you challenge an actor and they shrink, and Dwayne’s the opposite,” said the director, Brad Peyton.
Gugino who has worked with Johnson on three films, said that even when he’s playing a baddie, “there is a great sense of accountability and decency about him.”
Off screen, she added, “he’s just a really joyful person,” the kind who leaves singing voice mails on birthdays. “There’s a little homage to Frank Sinatra in him.”
For Johnson, tearing up on screen was no big deal, he said. “I can cry like that — I hear a song sometimes, Didn’t We Almost Have It All, by Whitney Houston, and” — his face crumpled into sadness. The most emotionally taxing part was imagining losing a child; he has a 13-year-old daughter with his ex-wife, Dany Garcia, and lives near her in Florida, with his longtime girlfriend, Lauren Hashian, a singer and songwriter. (One of his strength coaches is married to Garcia, who runs his production company, 7 Bucks. It’s named for the sum in his pocket after being cut from the Canadian Football League in 1995.)
Intimates call him D.J., but he also gladly answers to the Rock — that’s what President Barack Obama, whom he’s met a few times, calls him. He didn’t elaborate on his nicknames from Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, although he said “we’re all buddies”.
It’s not easy to preserve an Everyman aura when you’re pals with presidents. Johnson seems like he could go for hugs at any time. Or pulverize you if you cross him. He graduated with a criminology degree from the University of Miami and considered joining the FBI, although being a college football star intervened.
Ballers, which counts Garcia and Johnson as executive producers and was developed by Stephen Levinson (Entourage), serves as a kind of wish fulfillment for Johnson. He plays a recently retired pro football player transitioning to money management for his flashier teammates. “That guy’s career was my dream,” Johnson said. “I wanted to play in the NFL, and I wanted to make a lot of money. I wanted to buy my mum a house.”
The NFL never came calling, but he did buy his parents a house, in 1999, before buying one for himself — the first homes anyone in his family owned. Their well-recounted financial struggles — an eviction and paycheque-to-paycheque life, as he and his mother, Ata Johnson, followed his father, Rocky, on the wrestling circuit — fuelled his transformation into the Rock.
In a two-hour conversation here, where he is filming a comedy, Central Intelligence, with Kevin Hart, Johnson spent most of his time not talking up his movies but explaining his wild past. As a teenager, he bought a car for $40 from a drug addict, only to find, as he pulled onto the highway, another addict sleeping in the back seat. “We kicked him out,” he said, and then dumped the car in a Burger King parking lot. He started working out, and by 15 was full height, with a mustache. In high school, “they thought I was an undercover cop,” he said. “I had no friends.”
His popularity now — nearly 23 million followers on Twitter and Instagram — is a testament to his openness. “The bigger the room, the more comfortable he gets,” said Peyton, the San Andreas director.
Everyone who has crossed his path mentioned his work ethic. For Ballers, he envisioned his character as a male fashion plate, a la Carrie Bradshaw, so that people would tune in to see the three-piece suits and alligator shoes. In the over-the-top Furious series, it was important to wink at the audience — as when he bursts out of a cast by flexing a bicep. For each role, he considers what cologne his character would wear. After a week of tests, he settled on Kenzo for Central Intelligence. For San Andreas, it was Creed. In Furious, just baby oil, and the make-up artists were instructed not to remove a drop of sweat. “We’re on the go,” he explained.
In the Rock’s universe, “I like the idea that any project I touch, there is a general sense of action begets action,” he said. “Hard work begets results. And there is some optimism. And a dirty joke.”
