It is the perfect product marketing. He does not give a slip that has not been previously studied, like a good king of family adventure comedy. On screen he has not filmed torrid sex sequences, despite the fact that in 2016 the magazine People awarded him his annual title of “world’s sexiest man.” He is muscular, but in such a way that his body does not become synonymous with lust. He knows how to take advantage of his comic side, the trick of raising his right eyebrow exaggeratedly, and for this reason he has never chosen a script with dramatic complications. Because of his ethnic mix, he is as Irish as he is African-American, as Samoan as he is Canadian. His biography contains the right doses of family suffering, poverty, a truncated sports career and a slow rise to fame from the suburbs of showbusiness: The struggle wrestling. At 50, actor Dwayne Johnson (Hayward, California) has managed to become a seamless entertainment empire, and only his appearance in Black Adam, a trap for someone like him, focused on the family audience, has sown some doubt about his future professional career.
When in 2002 Dwayne Johnson, then known only as The Rock for his character in the fight wrestlingwent on Howard Stern’s radio show to promote his first feature film, The scorpion king, The announcer analyzed with a certain resentment the possibility that the actor was accredited in the cinema with his real name. “Really, who would want to watch a Dwayne Johnson movie?” he blurted out between laughs. Two decades later, that Dwayne Johnson is now just The Rock in the annals of his old sport, and he has become the world’s highest-earning actor in 2021, about 270 million euros, according to the forbes list, thanks to salaries of 20 million euros per film and income derived from his empire of clothes, headphones, shoes and television programs (a contest, The Titan Games, and a series about his adolescence, YoungRock).
All this led by his ex-wife, Dany Garcia, who leads that holding company of companies from different branches of leisure. Because Johnson’s great virtue is that no one dislikes him. He correctly manages his incredible popularity: at the beginning of 2021, a survey of 30,000 Americans assured that 46% would vote for Johnson as president of the United States. On Instagram, where this week he has exceeded 350 million followers —the sixth most followed on that social network, although according to scams.info 24% are false—, Johnson flirted with the possibility, and although he assured that the founding fathers would not have thought of a president like him, “half black, half Samoan, tequila drinker, truck driver”, if it happened it would be an honor serve the people. What’s more, he tested the ground at the risk of very positive new polls and spoke to politicians, in a curious end to a journey that has taken Johnson from the year 2000, when he attended both the Republican and Democratic conventions without any ideological motivation, to his comments against Trump, his statements in favor of the Black Lives movement Matter after the murder of George Floyd, stressing the need to “normalize equality”, and his support for the current president, Joe Biden. In October 2021, in the magazine Vanity Fair clarified: “Although I do possess some honest leadership qualities, that doesn’t make me a great presidential candidate.” End, for now, of the matter for a guy of 1.96 meters and 118 kilos of hilarious muscles: the Oval Office has never seen anything like it behind the presidential desk.
In this control of his image, which includes checking all the jokes in his three appearances in the anthill (something common among Hollywood stars), there is his visit on November 27 to a Seven Eleven in Hawaii willing to “make amends for a mistake from the past.” For years, Johnson recounted that in his teens, with his father, also a WWE wrestler on tour and away from his and his mother, “I didn’t have a dollar, so I used to steal a candy bar.” snickers giant size every day for almost a year, when I was 14, on my way to the gym. She was always the same dependent on her and she just turned her head. She never caught my eye.” Last Sunday she walked into the store, swept up all the snickers that he found on the shelf, He gave them away when he left and also paid the bills of the clients who were there at the time. It wasn’t more than 300 bucks, though on Instagram swept.
Johnson’s childhood was not easy. In 1987, he and his mother were evicted from their home in Hawaii for non-payment, something dramatic for the teenager, but that his father, the African-Canadian Rocky Johnson —who lived by profession, a WWE professional wrestler, in Tennessee—, ignored in his memories. The actor swore that he would not let something like this happen to his family again and started a bitter relationship with his mother. That year, his mother sent him to Nashville, and yet the boy lived with another wrestler. When his mother moved a month later, the Johnsons’ row was enormous and they never healed (although they didn’t divorce until 2006, a year before their son from his first wife did).
The Rock suffered another epiphany some time later, at the age of 22, when his career in American football ended, a sport that had paid for his university studies. Fired from the Canadian League, he returned to his parents’ house with a five-dollar bill, another one, and change. Hence the name of his production company, Seven Bucks Productions. And at that moment he went on to fight wrestling, to compete in WWE.
The interpretive turn in Black Adam He’s been chewing on it for years. In the American fight he already embodied the role of villain, so he knew what ground he was on. However, the 50-year-old Johnson is not the same as the 25-year-old: he has now softened the character so that he is not as ruthless as in the comics. On the big screen he hides a moral alibi. “I have been behind the project for 15 years”, counted on The New York Times. “As a kid I liked Marvel, but I loved DC [la editorial de Black Adam y de la Sociedad de la Justicia de América, sus antagonistas en el filme]”. Critics have not supported him and the public has been reluctant: Black Adam It has raised 375 million euros worldwide, after having cost nearly 200 million. And the fans of the comic have been outraged with the justification of the evil generated by the character, who in the cartoons was always implacable just because.
Black Adam it will be just a small blur in the career of the man who knows best how to arch his right eyebrow, a trick he picked up during his WWE years. In Hollywood, no one speaks ill of the likeable actor of Dad by surprise, both Jumanji, Journey to the Center of the Earth 2, Baywatch, A Spy and a Half, Project Rampage, San Andreas either Red alert. And only Vin Diesel and his eldest daughter, Simone Alexandra Johnson, the fruit of his marriage to Diaz (from the second he has two little girls, ages 7 and 4), drive him crazy. He had a worse time in his confrontation behind the scenes with Diesel in the four shootings they shared in the saga At full throttle (Fast & Furious). The train crash was inevitable, with a Diesel who did not want to be stepped on the ground. At 21, Simone Alexandra has become a wrestler and has signed a contract with WWE, which initially exasperated her father. “There were seasons where I fought 250 nights a year, and I know that kills marriages, families and anyone’s body,” she explains of her initial reluctance. He, meanwhile, will follow his: training twice a day from the neck -he has a machine only to muscle that part- to the ankles; feeding six; caring for and investing in her body as a luxury product that it is. she has rolled Red One with Chris Evans, prepare Red alert 2… The sun does not set on Johnson’s empire; not even his huge deltoids can hide it.
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