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The Family Guy

By: Bret Love

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Once known for his rough ’n’ tough demeanour in the wrestling ring, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has become Hollywood’s go-to guy for family-friendly films.

“He was sooooo nice!”
This is the response of a young journalist upon meeting Dwayne Johnson (the artist formerly known as The Rock) for the first time, as if she somehow expected the one-time pro wrestler to stand up mid-interview, rip off his form-fitting shirt, raise his trademark eyebrow and bellow his signature line, “Can you smell what The Rock is cooking!”

But those days have long since passed. Now, having made the gradual transition from athlete to action hero (see: The Scorpion King, Walking Tall) to comedian (Be Cool, Get Smart), the super-suave Johnson has emerged as a bona-fide Hollywood superstar. He also seems to have cornered the market on blockbuster family films after a hot streak that includes The Game Plan (which brought in $144 million at the global box office), Race to Witch Mountain, Planet 51 and this year’s Tooth Fairy.

It’s been a stunning transition to watch, establishing Johnson as the most successful athlete-to-actor crossover since Arnold Schwarzenegger became The Terminator. We recently spoke with the 6-foot-3-inch, mixed-race (half African-American, half Samoan) son of a pro wrestler about where his career is going, and just how far he’s come from where he’s been.

There was a time in your life when you weren’t on such a positive path. Can you talk about that?
That was a time in my life when I was making the wrong decisions, hanging around with the wrong people and running the streets doing a lot of things that I should not have been doing. I was very fortunate that I had someone who cared about me and invested time in me. It was my arresting officer, when I was 14 years old, who said, ‘I want you to stop screwing up and go out and play football for your freshman team.’ I didn’t learn overnight. I was a work in progress, and I continued to get in trouble because I thought he was full of it and that I had all the answers. But I didn’t know anything, and I continued to get arrested until I was 17, when my high school football coach in Pennsylvania invested even more time in me.

What kind of stuff were you doing?
Fighting and theft... It was bad, and I know what sports did for me. I didn’t realise it as a freshman. For me it was just a way to make my arresting officer happy so that, in the event I did get arrested again, maybe he’d let me go. It wasn’t until I got older that I understood the value of not only having someone who cared, but the value of sports and what that can do for you; the value of commitment and hard work and sacrificing your time after school to go to practice and do all those things that you carry with you for the rest of your life.

In what ways did your football and wrestling careers prepare you for your acting career?
Well, I played football for 10 years and I wrestled for an additional six years. Being in an athletic environment at a high level can teach people a lot. It taught me about commitment and sacrifice. I also learned the importance of being coachable and the importance of winning gracefully, as well as losing gracefully. Those are all traits I can take with me for life.

What did professional wrestling teach you?
The wrestling gave me a wonderful platform to entertain, which is something I had wanted to do for years. That type of environment, which involves four hours of live television every week, prepared me for the acting environment I now work in. It was like doing “Saturday Night Live” for four hours every week. It was a frenetic environment with multiple cameras where I played in front of anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 people. That was really invaluable.

Was there anyone in particular who helped guide you through the transition into acting?
There was one particular guy I’ve talked about in the past. His name is Pat Patterson, and I actually modelled my character in Be Cool after him. He’s a very proud gay man — very funny guy — and he’s been like a father figure to me. We spent a lot of time together, and creatively he was the guy who made sure I understand the value of simply wanting to entertain and taking your ego out of it. I think it’s best when you approach things in that way — ego is the great inhibitor of success a lot of times — and do what’s best for the audience so you can take them through a myriad of emotions. Between him and this great [WWE] writer named Brian Gwartz who consistently challenged me, we found a lot of humour in this world of heightened, over-the-top conflict, and that was a great place to be.

What was the key to successfully crossing over?
Making the transition was primarily about surrounding myself with great actors. In my first role in The Scorpion King, we had Michael Clarke Duncan and Grant Heslov, who’s also a great writer/director (Good Night, and Good Luck, The Men Who Stare at Goats) now as well, and a studio and director who supported me. I had to be as fully prepared as I could possibly be. Not that I was going to deliver an Oscar-winning performance, but as long as I was prepared and gave the best performance I could give, I knew I had a shot at being decent.

A lot of people from other entertainment mediums come to Hollywood and dive right into leading roles. But you’ve always seemed pretty deliberate in picking and choosing your roles.
I think it’s important to choose carefully. The thing you don’t want to do is work from a place of money, and I was fortunate to come into it with a pretty penny, so the money wasn’t motivating me as much as the work and the material. A lot of people who want to cross over into acting come into it saying, ‘I’m going to try the acting thing.’ If you go into it with that attitude, you’re not going to get much out of it. But if I see an athlete or musician who’s been really driven to succeed, I’m going to put my money on that person, because you can apply that same mentality to acting. It’s tough to be a good actor, and it’s really hard to make a good movie.

What’s more important to you: delivering a good performance or breaking box office records?
What’s important to me is being true to the character. Of course box office records are great, and you keep your fingers crossed and hope people will come out, watch the movie, spread word-of-mouth and do all the things that a good solid movie that delivers people’s money’s worth is supposed to do.

Is it fair to say that athletes who become actors seem to be typecast as action heroes, and historically don’t seem to be given much of a chance to act?
Sure. Hollywood’s an interesting machine, and once you realise that you begin to understand the ebbs and flows of it. The Scorpion King was all action, but I knew even then that I wanted to become a versatile actor. I just wasn’t getting the material that allowed me to do that. Be Cool was a really defining moment, because after that Hollywood was like, ‘Who knew?’ and everything I was getting was comedy.

From dressing in drag to kissing Steve Carell, you seem to be willing to do just about anything to get a laugh.
I love self-deprecating humour. It’s my favourite type of comedy, so if there are ways to inject it into my projects, I’m all for it. I like to strike a balance between that and finding some sort of arrogance in the character, even when it’s an unsuccessful one. That combination of endearing and arrogant can be very funny.

One of my favourite characters you’ve played recently is The Rock Obama, which comes off like an insane cross between you, the president and the Incredible Hulk. Are you an Obama supporter?
I’m proud to say that I’m a great fan of Barack Obama. I had the opportunity to speak with him after he won the presidency and he has always had my support. What a wonderful time we live in! He shared with me that I’m the favourite actor of his wife, which is something I’m very proud of.

Have you ever been approached to work with the president on any health or sporting issues?
It’s interesting you ask that, because we’re in the process of working together on some really cool things, the details of which will be coming out soon. It’s a possibility that I could become part of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, and there are other greater opportunities too. We’re trying to see where I can have the most impact.

Back to your film career, you’ve gradually moved from adult-oriented action and drama into more family-friendly fare. What was the appeal for you of  doing a film like Race to Witch Mountain?
Well, I loved that it was made with Disney, and I loved that I was able to combine some of the grittiness and intensity of the contemporary action movies I’ve done in the past with other elements I appreciate, such as heart, humour, family and a little bit of fantasy. We really treated the movie like a Disney ride, so the title is very fitting because there’s a very relentless drive to it. I really loved the idea of this guy who doesn’t have much now and has made a lot of mistakes along the way, but gets the opportunity to make a defining decision that allows him to save the world.

And now, after voicing an astronaut in the animated Planet 51, you’re playing the Tooth Fairy in a movie of the same name?
(Laughs.) Yeah, yeah.... I play a hockey player with a really bad shoulder injury in the movie, and one of the wings is beautiful and the other is a little messed up one that doesn’t quite grow correctly, making me fly into things. We’re going after heart and humour and a little touch of fantasy, so I’m very excited about it. It’s going to be really funny.

It seems like you’ve become the “family guy” now in terms of the films you’re looking for.
For me it was never a methodical choice, like, ‘I want to do three or four family movies in a row.’ The material just happened to come in. I really enjoyed the material, but now I’ll go back to action. But I think there’s always something special and unique about making a family movie, especially if it’s entertaining and has a pretty good message.

To borrow the name of one of your films, are these career moves all part of the game plan?
When I started acting in movies, I didn’t have a background in theatre and my parents weren’t movie executives, so I didn’t have that connection. But I thought I had pretty good instincts, and I loved the entertainment world and performing. That [wrestling] world that I came from benefited me greatly: That four hours on television every week was my theatre, ... But growth was always the goal. I really admire actors like Tom Hanks, Will Smith and George Clooney, who’ve had the type of career I aspire to have and are able to go from genre to genre and do a broad variety of movies. I love having the ability to go from action to drama to comedy, and will hopefully find a little bit of success in all of them.


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