Dwayne Johnson is refelcting on transition from wrestling to acting, and how the latter also ended up frustatrating him.
Johnson was already a household name as The Rock in WWE when he made his acting debut in 2001’s The Mummy Returns. Since then, he’s acted in many comedy and adventure films like Jumanji, Central Intelligence, and action films like Hobbs and Shaw, Red Notice and more.
The Moana actor was asked if the transition was always planned in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“I think it was planned by something more powerful than me, but also, I wanted to grow and to challenge myself, and transitioning into Hollywood was something that I definitely wanted,” he replied.
He continued, “With my first movie, The Mummy Returns, we were shooting in the Sahara Desert, and I was so sick — I went over there and probably ate something that I shouldn’t have — and it was 110 degrees, but I was freezing and wearing a blanket. Stephen Sommers, the director, comes over, ‘You okay?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah!’ I’d never acted before.”
“He calls ‘Action!’ We have our scene. And when he said, ‘Cut!’ I went, ‘This is what I want to do for the rest of my life,'” he recalled.
The actor was then asked about being the highest grossing actor of the year several times in his career, but ultimately getting frustrated by getting the same kind of roles.
“I had a lucky career,” he acknowledged, adding, “I reached a point seven or eight years ago where I had this little voice behind my rib cage. I think we all have it — sometimes it whispers to us, and sometimes it’s really resounding — and that voice for me was asking, ‘What’s more?’ I’m obsessed with the idea of trying.”
“Yes, ‘What’s yours is yours, what’s not yours is not yours,’ but also, I believe in setting an intention and taking a step toward the thing that you want because the universe has this way of meeting you halfway,” he added.
Dwayne Johnson’s yearning to be challenged as an actor was finally satisfied when he got the role of MMA fighter Mark Kerr in The Smashing Machine. The role got the actor critical acclaim and has genereated Oscar buzz for him.