How ‘The Rock’ Turned Back into Dwayne Johnson
In 2007, director Richard Kelly released a follow-up to his metaphysical head-scratcher/late-bloomer cult classic Donnie Darko — a paranoid satire titled Southland Tales that was so weird and staggeringly dense that it made his previous film look like a sitcom. The plot, if you can call it that, involved an energy crisis, the ongoing War on Terror and an impromptu sing-along of the Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done”; the cast included several Saturday Night Live alumni, Justin Timberlake, a spit-curled Wallace Shawn, and Kevin Smith playing, naturally, a wizard.
Still, there was one character who stood out from the movie’s ensemble of oddballs: a skittish actor/amnesiac named Boxer Santaros, who inadvertently predicts the end of the world via a screenplay he co-writes with a porn star/energy drink mogul played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. (Don’t worry about it.) And in a universe complete with ballroom zeppelins and erotic auto commercials, it made a weird sort of sense that the only actor who could play Santaros would be a strongman famous for his cocked eyebrow and inquiries about whether we can smell what he’s cooking.
Watching Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson — the originator of the People’s Elbow — flutter his fingers with nervousness at the first sign of danger struck a surreal contrast with his macho-man public persona. Among the tangled mythologizing, governmental surveillance conspiracy theorizing, and impromptu musical numbers, here was an actor learning just how wide his range really was. A film seen by few and enjoyed by even fewer marked the beginning of Johnson’s transition from another meatheaded action star into a routinely game performer whose overflowing charisma and hulking physique have catapulted him to mainstream stardom. Two men entered Southland Tales: Dwayne Johnson, and the larger-than-life character known as The Rock. One man, reinvented as a versatile character actor with a leading actor’s rippling musculature, left and never looked back.
The foundation for Johnson’s professional reinvention comes from his days in the squared circle. The WWE knows it, the fans know it, John Darnielle knows it: Wrestling is more performance than sport. The Samoan muscleman Rocky Maivia emphatically played the roles he was assigned, vacillating between the heroic and the villainous as he transitioned into the Rock after about a year with the former WWF. He’d later annoint himself with a nickname even more suited to his talents; that we have collectively stopped referring to Johnson as “The People’s Champion” is an unforgivable waste of a great title. Because whether he was riling up the fans as a heel or basking in their adoration as a face, the Rock was always committed to giving the people exactly what they want.
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