Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | September 23, 2025
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is gunning for Oscar gold this year for his performance in The Smashing Machine, which by all accounts features a strong turn from the former pro-wrestler. But it takes more than a great performance in an awards-positioned film to actually take home the prize. It takes a campaign, and while that campaign may have begun at the Toronto Film Festival, it kicks off in earnest with a New York Times 10,000+ word profile that lays it on thick, making it clear that Johnson’s campaign is serious.
“He is pure cinematic sunshine, appearing at regular intervals to beam down rays of positivity and entertainment and good old-fashioned mainstream popcorn fun,” Sam Anderson writes near the opening of the piece. But The Rock is not just sunshine and light. Dwayne Johnson—one of the most famous actors on the planet—also feels unseen.
“But the thing is, he had started to feel a little carried away by his own success. The studio pressure, the side businesses, the meetings, the requests, the smile, the charisma. He was the same person he’d always been, but he had a very different relationship to the world. He was so famous he couldn’t really go outside. Again, he was not complaining! And yet there was that old Hollywood paradox: On some deep, human level he also felt unseen, unknown, constrained.”
And in order to be seen, Dwayne Johnson would have to put on “a new kind of performance: not his usual charm and lightness but real pain, the sort of agony you can draw only from the reservoirs of your own life. The role would allow Johnson to express unexpressed parts of himself.”
Yes, the star of the Jumanji movies and Jungle Cruise would have to draw from those deep reservoirs of pain—and then express even more of that pain in a New York Times profile that would be extraordinarily difficult to schedule.
“Scheduling an interview with the Rock feels like trying to set up a coffee date with the king of England. Over months of back and forth with Johnson’s representatives, I got a sense that the pressure on his time is geological — that every moment is getting crushed from every direction all at once.”
Wow. Geological. But it was all worth it because, “as a conversational partner, Johnson is almost hilariously curious. He was constantly pausing his own answers to reflect questions back at me.” So curious!
But Dwayne Johnson is not like your typical celebrity who only wants to talk about himself. “Johnson listens hard, strenuously, athletically — as if he is squatting the weight of your answer with the bulging quads of his soul. When things start to get really revealing, when he feels what you are saying, you will begin to hear big rumbling noises: a deep seismic “MMMMMMMMMM” rolling your way from across the room. It sounds like a huge creature slumbering — like a dragon that is having a very meaningful dream about you.”
Wow. He really does listen hard. But my god, it’s so worth it for the scintillating conversation! “To my surprise, the conversations rarely turned out to be depressing — they were deep, intense, funny, energizing and often, paradoxically, uplifting.”
But this man, this man who introduces Super Bowls as casually as “the way the rest of us might introduce a cousin who is visiting for the summer,” is also, it turns out, “introverted and curious,” and best friends with Oscar winner Emily Blunt. “They bonded so deeply that they often refer to each other, publicly, as best friends. ‘I mean, he’s really a magical person,’ Blunt told me.”
But Emily Blunt knows the real Dwayne Johnson, the man beneath the “cinematic sunshine.”
“Blunt could see how much of Johnson’s public persona was a performance, a character he invented to survive. And that character seemed to have taken over his whole career.”
And The Smashing Machine? It’s a movie about pain, and what is the worst pain that Dwayne Johnson—a man who has suffered myriad injuries—has ever felt? The emotional pain inflicted by his neglectful, narcissistic father, Rocky Johnson, as portrayed by Joseph Lee Anderson in the ABC sitcom Young Rock.
But seriously, nearly half of the profile is about his tumultuous relationship with his father. I have no doubt it’s a great source of pain for him, and I’m glad he could pull from it to star in Benny Safdie’s film, but I will draw the line at this comparison: “Johnson making a film with Benny Safdie is like Taylor Swift making an album with Björk.”
Is it? Because I could’ve sworn I just saw Benny Safdie play a character named Frank Manatee in Happy Gilmore 2. Björk, he is not.
But good luck with that campaign, Dwayne. And good luck to the rest of us who are going to be reading flowery profiles like this one for the next several months. Maybe someone should just give him the Oscar now and save us from that whole ordeal.
Source: The New York Times
