made his name as in but he was told to ignore his past when he made the jump to Hollywood.
The former world champion has become one of the biggest names on the planet with roles in the likes of Jumanji, Fast and Furious, Moana and, but it wasn’t always so easy.
Dwayne has revealed he was urged to lose weight and not mention his WWE legacy as he looked to really succeed as an actor in the mid-2000s.
‘At that time, a few years into my Hollywood career, approximately the mid-2000s, I was told then that I had to lose weight, I had to change my eating habits and diet,’ he told .
‘I couldn’t go to the gym as much and had to slim down. I had to not reference the name The Rock, I had to do, as best I could, to not mention or reference the world I came from, the world I was proud to come from, in professional wrestling.
‘At that time, when there is no blueprint for somebody who looked like me, walked and talked like me, half-black, half-Samoan.
‘”You can’t be big, you can’t go to the gym you can’t call yourself The Rock, let’s not talk about pro wrestling.” ‘
Dwayne admitted while he believed ‘that s**t’ for a while, he reached a breaking point where he needed to make a decision, and the rest is history.
‘You buy into that s**t, as I did, until, one of two things is going to happen; you either continue down that road and you’re miserable, and eventually your career is probably going to fizzle out and you don’t have any sense of longevity or equality,’ he explained.
‘The other thing that (could) happen is you’re going to say, “F**k this s**t, I’m gonna be me, and we’re gonna see what happens.” ‘
He compared it to a when he was urged to smile all the time and play an inauthentic version of himself.
‘I wasn’t reacting authentically and I was being a very buttoned-down version of who I actually was at that time in the world of professional wrestling,’ he said.
‘In that authenticity moment of clarity, a funny thing happened in the world of pro wrestling and Hollywood, both industries conformed to my authenticity and allowed me to be me. That’s when things changed.’
