“It’s funny that the wrestler who clinched his success by breaking bad went on to become one of our tamest movie stars.” Lauren Michele Jackson considers the slippery identities of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
In 1996, a twenty-four-year-old Dwayne Johnson made his début in the World Wrestling Federation as Rocky Maivia, sporting cornflower-blue trunks and a thirsty white smile. The event was the annual Survivor Series, a winner-take-all group match. A big boy–six feet five and two hundred and seventy-five pounds, but nimble—Johnson was there to hit the big time, and he beat out the competition as though it were predestined, which, of course, it was.
The 2021 Disney film “Jungle Cruise” made certain patterns conspicuous. Based on an aging theme-park attraction, it starred Emily Blunt as a botanist and Johnson as her skipper as they embarked on adventure and a grand, colonial love story. But more than the zombie conquistadors and the Amazon river-bound U-boats, what stretched a viewer’s patience during the two-plus hours of PG-13 action was the complete lack of action between leads. The year before, Johnson had been named“Sexiest Man Alive.
Johnson has been open about his fraught relationship with his father, saying, “My dad loved me with the small capability he was capable of.” In a profile last year in, Johnson described a fierce argument with his father over a memoir Rocky had published shortly before his death, in early 2020. The book boasted a foreword allegedly written by Johnson, crediting Rocky for “everything I’ve done in wrestling, the movies, TV shows and overall business opportunities.
The “Baywatch” remake, from 2017, was something of an outlier. As a bronzed and vulgar-mouthed lieutenant lifeguard, Johnson exuded virility. As a friend of mine put it, he “topped the fuck out of Zac Efron,” metaphorically speaking. But other roles from the decade—many of them made by Johnson’s production company, Seven Bucks–were both consistently prudish and racially all over the place. He played an all-American first responder with a white wife and daughter and a Nigerian primatologist .
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