The Rock in a Hard Place
Who will remember Dwayne Johnson?
In the opening months of 2021, the United States of America was still reeling from what could rightly be called the single most contentious election in the nation’s history. Half of the country was in an uproar over what was perceived to be a blatantly fraudulent election in which former vice-president Joe Biden received more votes than any other candidate in any presidential race, ever1. The headlines were aflame with stories of a violent riot at the Capitol Building, pushed by the increasingly hysterical media as a genuine Putsch staged with the intention of preventing the duly elected presidential candidate from assuming office and ushering in a junta in the name of MAGA.
Regardless of your opinions on either event, you remember the tension in the air that lingered over the following months. It was a strange time, unlike any other in American history. Personally, I recall watching January 6th unfold on my work computer alongside my co-worker. Our boss told us, Well, it’s not happening here, so get back to work, which was a tall order when one of the single most significant events of the twenty-first century was playing out in real time on every screen we looked at. It’s a little hard to work when you’re living through a major historical event; I mean, I was in elementary school when 9/11 happened, but I distinctly remember my dad coming home from work very early that day.
This is all to say that the ideological divide that still runs like a chasm through American society has never felt deeper or more imposing than it did in the early months of 2021. It seemed then, as it does now, a genuine question if either side of the political spectrum could ever make amends and if we, as a nation, could ever meet in the middle again. Similarly, the question was raised that, if anyone was possible of pulling off such a Herculean feat - who could it be?
One man believed that he had what it might take to unite the divided country, bisected along lines of red and blue…
AND HIS NAME IS JOHN CENA!
Just kidding.
But the man in question was a wrestler. And that wrestler was Dwayne Johnson, better known by his nom de guerre, The Rock.
In an interview staged in February of 2021, Johnson made the following comment:
This wasn’t the first time Johnson floated the idea of running for the vaunted spot behind the Resolute Desk; Johnson had first mentioned his presidential aspirations in 2017, in which he said it was a real possibility, and again in 2018, in which he claimed to be seriously considering throwing his hat in the ring for what would become the most contested election of all time2. Ultimately, however, he did not think the timing was right since it was, by his estimation, arguably the most critical election in decades. He’d bow out and endorse Joe Biden, but he was always careful to mention that he was a political centrist that had voted for members of both major parties before. Without naming any names, of course.
At the time, the idea of Johnson as a presidential candidate was not terribly outlandish. At least, no more so than the idea of Kanye West making a genuine attempt to enter the election - and he actually did that.
A poll showed that 46% of Americans would consider supporting Johnson were he to make a run for the office, revealing just how serious both he and the public was about his potential candidacy. Silly as it sounds for a professional wrestler to take the Oval Office, I’d wager that a man of such a background couldn’t do worse than most of our current crop of career politicians. I’d also argue that, technically… he wouldn’t be the first professional wrestler to have a presidential portrait.
I don’t think Johnson was being facetious in his claims that he would run for president. I don’t think the people who said they vote for him were being dishonest, either. There was a time when I believe Johnson could have been a serious contender in a presidential election.
But, now, we’re in 2025. 2021 was four years ago as of this writing, and it has been a long, long four years at that. When Lenin dropped his famous line about decades happening in weeks, the 2020’s was exactly the kind of time he was talking about, because every fucking year of this decade so far has felt like… well, a decade.
For no one has this been more true than for our friend, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Johnson started the decade as one of Hollywood’s most beloved and iconic figures. Now, five years into it, his stock has declined precipitously. Nothing speaks to this more than his return to his original stomping grounds of professional wrestling in 2024, after retiring in 2019. Though professional wrestlers come in and out of retirement during their later years with more regularity than a bowel movement, the Rock’s return was contentious with the fans for a multitude of reasons. Chief among this was the fact that the then-current story line between champions Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes was more or less abruptly stopped so that Johnson could be shoe-horned into the thick of it. The video of his return on WWE’s official WrestleMania YouTube channel would be the most disliked of their entire catalogue. It should be noted that Johnson occupies a top spot on the board of directors of TKO, which owns WWE, which essentially means he flexed his spot at the top of the hierarchy to interrupt the current story line and sideline the two current champions in the circuit to insert himself as the top dog in the ring.
To a lot of wrestling fans3, this smacks of unwarranted arrogance and conceit on Johnson’s part, not to mention an abuse of his authority over TKO’s boardroom. While there’s nothing out of the ordinary about wrestlers crafting braggadocious, flashy, and narcissistic personas to play in the ring, and there’s little doubt that many of them end up buying into their own hype to some degree, there’s nothing inauthentic about the swaggering, dripped-out, egotistical personage Johnson presents; he really is that way.
Now, Johnson isn’t unknown to the world of professional wrestling. He was basically born into wrestling royalty on both sides of the family. His father was Canadian wrestler Rocky Johnson, who was one of the first black WWE champions alongside his partner, Tony Atlas.
On his mother’s side, he has connections to the prestigious Anoa’i family of Samoa, who’s bloodline include some of the prominent wrestlers of their respective eras4. His maternal grandmother, Lia Maivia, was one of the first female professional wrestler and a successful promoter in her own right.
Despite being related to wrestling superstars, Johnson’s upbringing was not an easy one. At the time, professional wrestlers were not the millionaires many of them are today - like football players in the early days of the NFL, even the most successful among them had to hold down day jobs just to make ends meet, and the significant toll their sport of choice took on their bodies often resulted in crippling health issues and, consequently, heavy substance abuse. It also required frequent relocation as wrestlers bounced from promotion to promotion, of which there were dozens scattered across the country at the time. This resulted in Johnson moving often as a child, and his father being absent for long periods of his upbringing. For much of his childhood, his father had no contact with him or his mother, and offered them no financial support, either. Even into adulthood, after Johnson became The Rock, it appears their relationship remained… complicated until Rocky Johnson’s passing in 2020.
Johnson’s difficult upbringing led him to legal trouble in his adolescent years. After settling down in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to ride out his final years of public schooling, he was arrested a handful of times for various minor offenses, including petty theft, check fraud, and brawling. There’s a strong likelihood that Johnson’s high school years could have ended with him behind bars if not for his high school’s football coach, who saw within the troubled young man great athletic potential. After being recruited to the school’s football team, Johnson began to clean up his act. You gotta hope he paid this guy some of his royalties as a sort of finder’s fee for keeping him out of prison and setting him on the road to success.
Johnson would attend the University of Miami on a full academic scholarship to play for their football team. There, he would develop his oratory skills and regularly give speeches around the city to underprivileged kids, preaching the dangers of petty crime and drug use, as well as graduating with a dual degree in criminology and physiology.
Though Johnson played for the University of Miami Hurricanes - then a Division 1 collegiate team - he only started in a single game. Most of the time, he sat on the bench. This didn’t sit well with Johnson, who harbored a desire to play in the NFL. Reasonably, he saw football as his one path to success. It’s understandable; a man like Johnson? He was made for football. It was basically all he could do.
I mean, it’s not like there was any other sport he was practically bred to be good at or anything he could fall back on, or anything.
Not at all.
Fortunately for Johnson, after graduating from the University of Miami, he did find his way into professional football.
In Canada.
It makes sense, I guess; the Rock does hold dual-citizenship between the US and Canada, since his father is from Nova Scotia. The Canadian Football League is one of those things that I’m told is popular in Canada, but at the same time, I’ve never heard a Canadian ever talk about it. I’ve met plenty of Canadians who will chatter all day long about hockey, but the CFL? Not once.
Some cursory research tells me that, apparently, it’s been waning in popularity as the NFL increasingly muscles in on their turf, which leads me to believe that, some day soon, they’ll probably get bought out and you’ll see the Calgary Stampeders playing the Cowboys at Jerry World.
Oh, that’s who Johnson played for, by the way. The Calgary Stampeders.
His professional football career with the Stampeders lasted a grand total of two weeks. He didn’t even make it off the practice squad. Dejected, the Rock returned from the Great White North, no doubt confused, listless, and unsure of what to do with himself.
I like to imagine that, one day, as he languished in despair, agonizing over his rejection from the Glorious Stampeders, he clouds above his head opened up and, there, in the sky, stood the ethereal figures of all the great Samoan wrestlers in his family that had gone before him. Dwayne, my son, one of them would say. Your time has come. You know what you must do. A lei made of the most beautiful and fragrant tropical flowers descended from on high and into his hands. As he put it around his neck, his ancestors, arms crossed and smiling, simply nodded in approval before disappearing back into the great island in the sky.
In reality, I imagine he kind of just had the epiphany one day that, Oh, yeah. I’m basically wrestling royalty. I guess I can do that.
Sure enough, the son of Rocky Johnson and the (adopted) heir of the Maivia family had no trouble getting scooped up in the industry. Now, I am not a professional wrestling fan. I know more about the industry and it’s inner-workings than I do how the sport actually works because, to me, the corporate drama and the tumultuous private lives of the stars are far more interesting than what goes on in the ring. I can’t really sketch out Johnson’s ascendancy to wrestling stardom because, frankly, it’s very long, very detailed, and I can’t make heads or tails of half the shit I read about it.
Let’s just say that, by the late 90’s, he was one of wrestling’s biggest names, and he would remain a fixture of the industry throughout the 2000’s. He is widely regarded as one of the best to ever step in the ring, even today. Literally the only things I can tell you is that he was extremely successful and his catchphrase was Can you smell what the Rock is cooking?
By the year 2000, only four years after his wrestling debut, the Rock was already topping the charts of biggest celebrities in various tabloids and entertainment rags. Just that year, his autobiography, The Rock Says, was on the New York Times Best-Seller list. He had, perhaps more than any other wrestler, cross-over appeal with the mainstream that hadn’t been seen since Hulkamania was runnin’ wild, brother. There’s an argument to be made that he was even bigger than Hulk Hogan at his peak, since Hogan never quite managed to get his career as an actor off the ground.
The Rock, on the other hand, didn’t have a lead up to his success in Hollywood; his trajectory in the movie industry is a vertical line straight up. In 2001, Johnson would debut on the silver screen in The Mummy Returns as the Scorpion King. These days, there’s a lot of nostalgia for The Mummy series of movies. Understandably - the first one is pretty fun, and seeing the great Brendan Fraser back at his peak is always nice. But I think most people forget that the third installment of the franchise was hot trash, and none of them had special effects that have withstood the passage of time. The Scorpion King himself spends half of his screen-time as perhaps once of the most infamously hideous CGI effects ever to cross the silver screen.
Shoddy early-2000’s CGI aside, the film was a major success. The Rock, despite his hideous computer generated doppleganger, was such a hit in his role that the studio saw fit to give the Scoprion King his own prequel movie only a year later. This would be the Rock’s first leading role, for which he would break the record for the highest paid actor in their first leading role with a staggering paycheck of $5 million. Chump change compared to what he’d make later, sure, but not bad for a first timer.
I think I saw it on the Sci-Fi Channel way back when. Can’t recommend. It still made enough cash to warrant not one, but two sequels - none of which the Rock was in. If the movie did anything, it was convince people that Johnson had the makings of an enduring action movie star. Which, yeah; posterity has borne out that theory.
Like his wrestling career, I don’t really need to go in depth on his acting career, either. The guy quickly cemented himself as a regular presence in Hollywood. Even though the earliest years of his career were spent making cheesy action movies and, more than anything, kid’s movies for Disney like Escape from Witch Mountain and The Tooth Fairy, Johnson’s star would go supernova when in 2011 when he was cast as Luke Hobbs in the Fast and Furious franchise’s fifth installment. I’ve never particularly cared for those films, but they just print money, so it was a good franchise for Johnson to hitch his wagon on since they’d go on to make, oh, fucking five more of them and a spin-off starring Johnson’s and Jason Statham’s characters.
Between Fast Five in 2011 and the sequel to the rebooted Jumanji film in 2019, quite literally everything the Rock was in made beaucoup bucks. Though the many, many movies he was in during this near-decade long stretch varied wildly in quality, they were all considered box office gold. It’s worth noting that he hit it huge with the Disney film, Moana, in which he plays the trickster demi-god, Maui. I remember the usual suspects getting their knickers in a twist because the Rock was playing a Polynesian god and bluh bluh bluh it’s cultural appropriation for an ambiguously brown guy to be playing a Polynesian character because those roles should go to actual Polynesians! It showed how much they actually know about their pet causes du jure and fail to do even the barest amount of research about what they’re flapping their gums over, since, y’know - Johnson is (half) Samoan and has repped his island heritage with pride. You have to be willfully ignorant not to know he’s Samoan. I mean, he just looks it. Have you seen the guys coming out of those islands in the Pacific? As Grandaddy Ape would say, they tend to be built like brick shithouses.
Point is, Moana was a mega-success that spawned a billion-dollar sequel that came out only a year prior as of this writing. It also gave us one of the best songs from any Disney movie ever, which happens to be the Rock’s big musical number.
God damn I hate Lin-Manuel Miranda’s music so much, but I must admit that I do love this song. The movie itself? It’s okay.
Between 2010 and 2020, Johnson’s movies collectively grossed over ten billion dollars. He was the highest-grossing actor outside of the decade not named Robert Downey Jr. or Chris Evans, and I don’t need to tell you why those two were raking in cold, hard cash hand over fist.
During this time, the Rock would step away from wrestling to focus on his acting career, though he’d continue to make sporadic appearances throughout the decade.
He would also begin to foster an immense following on social media. As of 2024, he is the sixth most followed person on Instagram. His other social media pages boast similar numbers. He would post frequently - by which I mean almost every day - and cultivate an image of himself that was very positive and wholesome. He’d speak about the importance of maintaining good health, physical and mental. He’d upload videos where he’d encourage his viewers to go out, work hard, and do the best that they could. It was proto-Grind Culture stuff, made palatable to the masses by the Rock’s friendly, nice-guy persona. All in all, he garnered a very substantial fanbase and, in turn, was widely beloved. People saw him as a good, honest, down-to-earth man who, despite his celebrity status and immense wealth, was really no different than you or me.
You know - the little people.
A couple viral clips on social media helped grease some skids along the way.
In a lot of ways, his behavior was that of the prototypical influencer. Though he hawked a lot of brands, of which he had lucrative endorsement deals with many, and his own products - none of which he was more proud of than his tequila brand, Teremana - but the main thing he was selling was himself.
JoJo Siwa’s brand is JoJo Siwa. Jack Black’s brand is Jack Black. Hell, Taylor Swift’s brand is Taylor Swift. These people were and are all selling idealized versions of themselves to the public.
And, if the Rock’s success in the 2010’s was any indication, his brand was doing gangbuster business.
Perhaps the Rock’s most relatable aspect is that, come 2020 and the dawning of a new decade, a lot began to change for him. And fast.
Johnson took a year long hiatus from Hollywood during the thick of the COVID fiasco before returning in 2021 with another Disney movie, Jungle Cruise. Though the film did make its production budget back - and even then, only barely - it was the first movie in a decade in which a movie featuring the Rock in a lead role under-performed. He had some small wins, including the Netflix-exclusive film Red Notice and an animated movie where he played Superman’s dog.
I forgot this happened, too. But the wheels would begin to fall of the Rock’s hype-train with the release of another DC project: Black Adam.
Before we begin, here’s a primer so things make a little more sense: Black Adam is a DC Comics villain, most well known for being the arch-nemesis and evil foil to the superhero, Shazam. Black Adam is not Lex Luthor. Shazam is not Superman. They are, at best, B-Listers in DC’s stable of heroes and villains; sure, they’re frequent presences in the larger DC universe, and Shazam is a pretty regular member of the Justice League, but Batman and the Joker they are not.
When the DCEU5 greenlit a movie about Shazam, Black Adam, as Shazam’s most noteworthy adversary, was a shoe-in for the film’s villain. But there was a problem - Johnson was already cast as Black Adam. In fact, Johnson had been approached to play Black Adam in 2007, long before the DCEU was even a gray-tone, slow-motion dream in Zach Snyder’s head, when the Rock was just a movie star and not the movie star of a decade, and way back when Warner Brother’s wanted to make a slew of stand-alone films featuring DC heroes; including Shazam. It was a role that Johnson had been infatuated with since he was pitched the idea, given that Black Adam is basically Superman, but edgy. He’s not always a villain; often times, he’s an anti-hero. He’s Superman with a streak of cool and a sharp edge because he, like, kills people, man.
But the crowned heads at Warner Brothers were afraid of using Black Adam as the villain in a DCEU Shazam movie, since they believed an actor of the Rock’s caliber would be wasted playing second banana to their pick for Shazam - Zachary Levi.
And, here’s the other issue: in a movie called Shazam, where the protagonist is Shazam, it stands to reason that Shazam will beat the bad guy, right? Well, that’s a problem if the antagonist is Black Adam/The Rock, because the Rock does not lose.
It’s in his contract.
In every contract Johnson signs, there is what’s called a no-lose clause; basically, it means that if the Rock’s character is fighting a baddie, he’ll win every time. There’s further stipulations that state he cannot be hit more times by any single actor than he hits them, among other equally silly stipulations put in place to make sure that he looks like a larger-than-life badass. Now, Johnson is not the only actor to work such rules into his contracts. Reportedly, the practice began with his Fast & Furious co-star, Vin Diesel, which explains why the Rock’s character in that franchise rapidly became an anti-hero rather than an out-and-out antagonist. His Hobbs and Shaw partner, Jason Statham, is well known for including such clauses in his own films. Johnson, however, is the most notable (and controversial) subject for using these clauses as a means of leveraging more control over the script, the production, and basically all other facets of the movie. After all, if the script writers pen a scene where the Rock loses a fight, he has every right, per his contract, to tell them, You’d best rewrite that shit right now.
So, it was decided that Shazam’s movie would feature a different villain, and the Rock would get his own stand-alone feature film as Black Adam.
This, with 20/20 hindsight, can be generously described as a mistake.
I do not think there has been any other movie that has caused as much damage to a star’s reputation as Black Adam. Marlon Brando, at his most obese and insufferable, or Klaus Kinski at his most deranged, did not suffer the blow-back that the Rock got from Black Adam. And keep in mind that, while filming Fitzcarraldo, the indigenous Amazonian tribesmen playing extras in the movie asked director Werner Herzog if he wanted them to kill Kinski for him.
From the word go, the Rock had the Black Adam project in a stranglehold. Though the movie was nominally directed by Spaniard Jaume Collet-Serra, Johnson meddled in every aspect of the movie to the point that the credit should be given to him. He brought in his own crew of sycophants to oversee production, which created a contentious atmosphere between Warner Brothers’ personnel and Johnson’s yes-men. He had the movie reworked and rewritten several times to fit his grandiose vision for the character. He even escalated he issues up the food chain and clashed with the DCEU’s creative directors in an attempt to more or less recenter the entire multi-film universe around the character of Black Adam. More than anything, he did not want to be in a movie where he’d fight some second-stringer like Shazam… even though Black Adam is Shazam’s primary antagonist. No - after much haggling and negotiating with the DCEU’s creative directors, he was allowed to shoot a post-credit scene in which it is heavily implied that Black Adam would fight Superman.
Because of course the Rock wants to be the character that beats up Superman.
In order to do this, he banked on fans of the DCEU desire to see Henry Cavill don the red cape once more, and effectively forced Warner Brothers to kind of, sort of, maybe agree to have him return as Superman even though they really didn’t want him to. Reportedly, he did this by skirting some of the higher ups and exploiting interpersonal beefs within the studio’s C-Suite to do it. This did little to endear Johnson to the folks who were signing his paychecks.
The whole thing smacked of narcissism of a sort that only a man of Johnson’s net value can exert; he was given the role of a glorified B-tier baddie but, because he’s the fucking Rock… no, no, no. The Rock does not play B-tier pissants. He wanted elevate Black Adam to be the guy around which the DCEU spins. He pushed for Black Adam to be entirely divorced from Shazam’s corner of the cinematic universe and, in the process, fucked over production on Shazam 2 by refusing to even cameo in it.
Hell, Shazam was supposed to cameo in Black Adam, and didn’t because the Rock wouldn’t let it happen. Zachary Levi - Shazam’s actor - was not shy about pointing fingers when Shazam 2 flopped, accusing Johnson’s conceit as a key factor in the movie’s failure. While that was far from the only reason Shazam 2 landed like a steaming cow pie at the box office, I can’t imagine Johnson’s behind-the-scenes politicking to have Shazam drummed out of the larger DCEU helped much.
At some point, the Rock stated that he wanted Black Adam to be the DCEU’s Iron Man. This implied that he wanted to be the Robert Downey Jr. of the franchise, too - in other words, he wanted to be the face of it.
It all comes off like some amateur role-player who insists that their super-special original the character (do not steal) is, like, totally the bestest ever and can beat up literal gods, so he really shouldn’t be relegated to playing pick-up-sticks with your gaggle of drooling, dumpy losers when he deserves to be backhanding Mega-Cthulu like a pimp who’s owed money.
Johnson’s megalomaniacal behavior would continue as the release of Black Adam crept closer. There wasn’t a marketing push so much as a marketing blitzkreig; the Rock was everywhere, on every outlet, leering down at people from billboards across the country beneath the words YOU ARE NOT READY or some shit like that.
Quite literally everything he posted on social media for months leading up to the release pertained to Black Adam. He was gassing this film up on levels previously unseen in the superhero genre.
If it tells you just how far he’d jammed his skull into his rectum, he fought with Warner Brothers’ over the movie’s premier. He reportedly pitched a hissy fit about what would and wouldn’t be served at the bar; he got his way in the end, so the only alcoholic beverage on offer was his own brand of Teremana tequila. It sounds absurd, but it happened.
When the movie finally limped into theaters, it was met with overwhelmingly poor reviews from critics, a decidedly mixed reception from DC fans, and a lackluster box office haul of $360 million on a budget that could have been as high as $260 million. Keep in mind that number does not include the marketing budget, which is often double the production budget, nor does it account for the multiple rewrites, delays, and reshoots that plagued the production.
Pathologically unable to restrain himself, apparently, the Rock dumped gasoline on the raging dumpster fire by engaging in an undeserved victory lap on social media, insisting that the movie didn’t flop. Really, guys. It made money. The money men told me.
To this day, he continues to assert that, no, seriously, like, honest guys - it was a success, and there will be more Black Adam and YOU ARE NOT READY. Or some shit like that.
Needless to say, after years of the Rock acting like a spoiled primadonna and making everyone at Warner Brothers’ life more difficult since the project left the ground, the men at the top were not happy with him.
Johnson’s juvenile, narcissistic behavior, his attempt at a soft coup of the DCEU, and clashes with Warner Brothers higher ups were widely reported on by the entertainment media. The gloss on his highly-curated image of a down-to-earth nice guy was ripped off so hard that it took some skin with it. Revelations about his absurdly self-absorbed behavior spilled out in a deluge, like the news that he brought an entire personal gym with him to every single set he worked on, or being chronically late to set and combative with other stars when he deigns to grace it with his presence. It also turned out that he’d been engaged in over a decade long blood feud with Fast & Furious co-star Vin Diesel, with the two grown ass men taking passive-aggressive swipes at one another over social media like petty high school girls.
This all happened after Johnson caught serious flack for opening a charity fund for the victims of the horrific Maui wildfires. Now, it sounds a bit odd that collecting money for the victims of one of the worst disasters in recent memory would engender the man ill-will. Now, I will admit, this controversy is a bit… silly, since people were mad that the Rock and Oprah only donated five million dollars of their own money to the cause. And, yes - I get it. Oprah’s net worth is over a billion dollars. She doesn’t even get out of bed for less than a hundred million dollars. I also don’t trust her as far as I can throw her. But, at the same time, getting mad at them for hosting a charitable cause because they didn’t donate enough, I think we should be glad they donated anything6.
Still, my opinion aside, the Rock got a nice ding in his rapidly tarnishing reputation for that one.
But no other controversy cost Johnson the goodwill he’d worked so hard to build up during the 2010’s than perhaps the most simple one - he was a liar. He lied. A lot. About everything.
One instance that got people scrutinizing his claims a bit more was the fact that, on Instagram, he was going to In-N-Out Burger for the first time an awful lot. I don’t know about you, but I’ve only been to In-N-Out Burger for the first time once. Maybe I have to be wealthy to unlock the privilege of going to a place for the first time multiple times, or maybe it’ll come for free when I’m old and senile and forget where I’ve been7, but it struck folks as awful odd that the Rock had the pleasure of getting a double-double and some fries at California’s iconic burger joint for the first time on no less than three occasions. His diet, too, is highly doubtful - I’m no nutritionist, so if you want a breakdown of just why his claims of eating such a ridiculous amount of food each day are skeptical, I’d point you in the direction of this video.
There is, of course, his fizeek, as well. The Rock has long maintained that he’s all natty, bro. Of this claim, he is adamant, and boasts it with pride. The Rock is currently 55 years old.
This is simply not the body a fifty-five year old has when they’re all natty (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. not withstanding). I know that the Rock has the time, money, and resources that the average person doesn’t have in order to keep himself in immaculate shape, but his inhuman proportions just cannot be achieved through hard work and sweat alone. If you look at pictures of him now against pictures of him in his thirties, when the human body is most often in or close to its physical prime, he’s almost unrecognizable.
Again, this video offers a good in-depth dissection of why his claims of being all natty are dubious at best. And you really don’t need to be a nutritionist, a bodybuilder, or a physiologist of any sort to suspect as much.
All these factors combined into a toxic sludge that has gradually eaten away at the Rock’s once glimmering Hollywood star. The thing about the Rock is that I don’t think his acting skills were ever the main contributing factor to his success. This isn’t to say Johnson is a terrible actor - he’s not abjectly terrible, but he does flourish in one specific type of role; the rough-and-tumble good guy. The big, burly muscle-man who’s got some edges but, at his core, he’s a teddy bear. Even Black Adam, despite the Shadow the Hedgehog to Superman’s Sonic, has a secret soft spot for pretty ladies and little kids8. One of the more frequent criticisms leveled against Johnson is that he only ever plays those roles, and, outside of that, he doesn’t have much to offer.
What he did have to offer, however, was the image he’d crafted for himself; the image of a self-made super-star who achieved greatness through honest work, grit, and tenacity, but had remained humble and sensible, immune from the venomous influence of fame and wealth. And, to be fair, some of that is true. I’d say that the Rock, despite his genetic in-roads into wrestling, still built a name for himself on his own talents, and it would be disingenuous to deny that he has an extraordinary work ethic. However, the whole humble and sensible bit was… a bit exaggerated, if his recent behavior has been anything to go by.
But that’s what people liked about him the most. It was, in my opinion, the silver bullet in his arsenal; the ability to project complicity with the masses. This glossy, idealized image he manufactured that, at his core, he was just like you - the little guy. And if he could claw his way to where he got through sheer elbow grease and a little luck? Well, so could you, and you could do it all without sacrificing that genuine core of who you are at heart.
That was the Rock.
But it wasn’t Dwayne Johnson.
I don’t think the Rock’s career is set for an immediate and dramatic plunge. His success over the past year has been a mixed bag. In 2024, Johnson starred in Moana 2, which grossed over a billion dollars despite being a thoroughly mediocre sequel to a slightly above average precursor. Given that Moana 2 ended with the most aggressively shameless sequel hook I’ve ever seen, I don’t doubt that the Rock won’t be hurting for future work (or profit) reprising his role as Maui, nor that Moana 15: Into the Moanaverse will fail to pay dividends.
But I think it’s safe to say that it wasn’t the Rock’s presence that propelled Moana 2 to the lofty spot of the third highest grossing movie of 2024; those still stuck in the morass of online culture wars can wring their hands over Disney going woke and going broke ad nauseum, but clearly, the company’s tarnished brand isn’t stopping them from pumping out the occasional mega-win that will help soften the blow of their myriad failures. Like Frozen, Moana is just one of those Disney IPs that, barring a catastrophic miscalculation, is going to continue to print money for a long time yet to come because children still exist.
Johnson also headlined the Christmas action-comedy, Red One, alongside Avengers-alum Chris Evans near the end of the year. It was intended to launch a cinematic universe of holiday-themed action movies since Hollywood has yet to abandon the whole interconnected canon schtick despite it working out approximately one time. Given that the movie was panned by critics, failed to recoup its eye-watering budget of $250 million (plus marketing!), and was ground zero for reports of the Rock’s difficulty to work with on set (and claims that he has a habit of exclusively urinating in Voss water bottles while on set), I don’t think the prospect of the Rock’s Holiday Blow-Out Boogaloo Universe are looking all that promising.
Red One’s failure to launch and the mounting scrutiny of the Rock’s personal character suggests to me that the Rock’s name has lost the magnetic draw it had during the 2010’s. Slapping his name next to the word starring is not going to guarantee a return on investment going forward. This isn’t to say that Johnson won’t ever headline a single successful film from 2025 onward, but I don’t think he will be the prime attraction putting asses in theater seats; they’ll succeed and he’ll just happen to be in them, not succeeding because he’s attached to the project.
Will this theory bear out? Only time will tell. Perhaps we’ll see a Rock-Renaissance as the last half of the 2020’s unfolds. Maybe, come 2028, we’ll be watching Johnson, right hand on the Bible, being sworn into the highest office in the land. Stranger things have happened.
After all, he wouldn’t be the first wrestler to carve out such a place for himself in history - and no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump.
Have you ever heard of Plato?
Of course you have. Pretty much everyone in the West has heard of Plato, though they may not know exactly why his name is attached to so many things. Were you aware that, before he sat in the agora with Socrates, before he educated Aristotle, before he became perhaps the single most important thinker in Western civilization, Plato was a wrestler?
Wrestling was, of course, very popular with the Greeks of that time. After all, it did involve sweaty, naked men grappling one another, which was something they were apparently quite fond of. But Plato, it seems, must have been quite good at it. Tradition holds that Plato was not his given name. Plato was a nickname that was likely derived from the Greek word Platus or Platon, which translates to Broad. According to some ancient sources, Plato’s real name was Aristocles9. But the sobriquet of Plato - the Broad - supposedly bestowed by his wrestling coach Ariston of Argos, is the one by which posterity knows the man by best10.
We in the West remember Plato; a towering titan of philosophy who quite literally shaped the way the Western man thinks, near mythical in his scale. The man behind the title, Aristocles, is largely forgotten.
When future generations look back at this moment in American culture - or perhaps history - will they remember Dwayne Johnson? Or will they be arguing over the true name of the man best known as the Rock?
And, all those years later, through the misty shroud of time, I have to wonder: will they still smell what he was cooking?
Whether or not this is the case is not pertinent to the discussion at hand, so I kindly ask you to refrain from waging a debate in the comments whether or not the election in 2020 was stolen. Anyone who’s read my publication long enough already knows what I believe on the matter.
Perhaps a good call sitting that one out.
Of which I am not one, so this is all coming from researching a whole lot of professional wrestling.
Johnson is not blood related to the clan, however; his mother was adopted by the Maivia’s.
The DC Expanded Universe, which was DC’s ill-fated attempt to compete with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
It should be noted that Johnson and Oprah were “inspired” to start the fund by Dolly Parton doing the same for victims of wildfires in Tennessee circa 2017. They seemingly failed to recall that Parton is not only from the affected the area of Tennessee, but also has spent a considerable sum of her personal fortune on charitable causes in her home state for several decades.
No, no, no, not in that way, you sicko!
Artistocles as a name roughly translates to the best reputation, which means it’s either a bullshit story or the greatest case study in nominal determinism of all time.
This is, of course, all fiercely debated. Some modern historians believe that Platon was his actual name.
"In every contract Johnson signs, there is what’s called a no-lose clause."
That is hilarious and the lamest thing I've ever heard.
I hope you take it as a credit to your writing that I was sure you were making that up until a few paragraphs later (you've occasionally blended fact and fiction, after all). I'm still not 100% convinced it's true, and while I could do my own research, I've decided that I prefer to live in a world where "action stars" have such ridiculous contact clauses for their movies.
The pebble