Before Dwayne Johnson was a huge movie star, mostly specializing in action/adventure projects, he plied his trade as a top WWE wrestler. A star athlete in college, the future Rock originally planned to make a go for a professional football career, but various injuries ended up making that unfeasible. Thankfully, Johnson had a fallback plan, as his father and grandfather had both been successful professional wrestlers in the WWWF and WWF, the predecessors to today’s Vince McMahon-owned company WWE.
Johnson’s grandfather wrestled as “High Chief” Peter Maivia, while his father wrestled as Rocky Johnson, with the latter becoming one-half of the first-ever Black world tag team champions with Tony Atlas. Needless to say, Dwayne Johnson had some big shoes to fill, and initially embraced his heritage when he debuted in the WWF as Rocky Maivia. Sadly, his smiling good guy act fell flat with fans that had started to embrace people like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, and chants of “Rocky Sucks!” filled arenas.
Thankfully, Johnson soon became The Rock, embracing his inner jerk, delivering some of the most cutting and hilarious promos in wrestling history, and captivating the crowd. Before long, The Rock was so popular he became “The People’s Champion,” as he was just too entertaining to hate. He retired from full-time wrestling in 2004 to focus on Hollywood, and aside from a few brief returns, is still primarily an actor now. Luckily for Johnson, his life as a wrestler prepared him well to be the big time action star he is today in blockbuster Disney movies like Jungle Cruise.
While most WWE wrestlers obviously would never be mistaken for Daniel Day-Lewis when it comes to acting skill, it shouldn’t be underestimated how much of what they do involves acting. Unlike normal TV stars, wrestlers play their characters nearly every day of the year, and usually in front of a live audience. That required Johnson to become good at improvising, thinking on his feet, and knowing when to call an audible when something isn’t working in the moment.
Many would argue that Johnson doesn’t try to challenge himself enough with his acting roles, but he’s simply following in the footsteps of past action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis, who had one basic persona that they tweaked slightly for each new movie. For Johnson, this persona is quite close to his wrestling character, but with the volume lowered slightly and less casual insults being thrown. Still, wrestling fans will catch flashes of WWE’s The Rock in characters like Luke Hobbs and Smolder Bravestone.
Dwayne Johnson also keeps himself in peak physical condition and does a lot of his own stunts for his action movies, and the physical toll that working for WWE when he was a full-timer took on him likely makes stunt work seem like a breeze. On a deeper level, the sometimes cutthroat world of professional wrestling and the numerous backstage rules and politics involved with it likely prepared Johnson for the also notoriously harsh movie business. When one is used to needing to stay on the good sides of people like Vince McMahon and The Undertaker on a daily basis, Hollywood producers probably fail to intimidate.
