This is Hollywood’s reigning action hero, an ambitious wrestler turned actor, as smart as he is supple, as driven as he is dynamic. Combining several traits of the ’90s action stars — the wit of Willis, the strength of Schwarzenegger, the heart of Stallone — he’s become the go-to guy for studios anxious to reboot their franchises.
Twelve years after Johnson’s inauspicious big-screen debut in 2001’s The Mummy Returns — and after a decade of “singles and doubles,” as he puts it — he is poised to go from a dependable player to MVP, if two mammoth upcoming releases deliver. First is MGM/Paramount’s sword-and-sandals epic Hercules, due out July 25. Then there’s the 2015 Warner Bros. earthquake disaster flick San Andreas, which Johnson is shooting in Australia at a salary of about $12 million — the type of number that makes even other A-listers blink.
Johnson describes his current life with a sophistication not always apparent onscreen, laughing readily and infectiously. But his past is never too far from his mind. “I remember it as if it were yesterday,” he says. Johnson was 14 when he came home and found an eviction notice pinned to the door. He was living in Hawaii with his mother, Ata, while his father, Rocky, a professional wrestler, was scraping a living going from one wrestling circuit to another.
After abandoning football, Johnson followed his father and grandfather into wrestling, taking the moniker "Rocky Maivia" from his dad’s first name and his granddad’s last. After a few false starts — when fans rejected Johnson’s nice-guy image as fake and booed him with the chant, "Rocky sucks!" — he reinvented himself as a bad guy. "There are two terms in wrestling,” says Johnson. “Baby face is your hero, heel is your villain. I had no choice but to go heel." Rocky became The Rock.
Five years after Johnson started wrestling, a 2000 hosting stint on Saturday Night Live led to The Mummy Returns, which was followed by more than a dozen films including 2005’s Be Cool, 2007’s The Game Plan and 2008’s Get Smart. Still, the star knew something was missing. "I was told that I had to conform to a standard in Hollywood that would beget me more work, better roles," he explains. "Which meant I had to stop going to the gym, which meant I couldn’t be as big, which meant you had to distance yourself from wrestling. You essentially had to deconstruct yourself."
The real turnaround came after CAA put together Johnson’s Fast Five deal, when he debated returning to the ring for the first time in years, a move his representatives at CAA strongly cautioned against. (He would do so in April 2011 for WrestleMania XXVII.) That was when he bolted. On Vince McMahon’s advice, Johnson spoke to WME’s Ari Emanuel, who invited him and Dany Garcia, his ex-wife and longtime manager, to a meeting in L.A. with about 150 WME staff, including the man who would become Johnson’s key rep, Brad Slater. Johnson was stunned by their enthusiasm and hunger, a hunger he shared.
"I felt there were bigger and better opportunities," he says. "I also felt there was franchise potential, hopefully multiple franchises in every genre — whether drama or comedy or action-comedy. I thought, ‘I want people around me who see this, too. And if we fail, that’s OK. We are going to fail swinging for the fences.' " Hercules is part of that swing.