He went on to become one of the most successful wrestlers in history, with 17 championship reigns. “I loved it,” he says. “I loved the showmanship, and I loved the theatricality. It was so entertaining and over-the-top, and I was always mesmerized by these guys.”
The Rock made millions for himself and the WWE, working closely with its chairman, Vince McMahon, to whom he still turns for counsel. He became one of the few modern wrestlers to cross over into mainstream pop culture because, he says, he dared to add a dash of comedy to his bad-guy turn. WWE capitalized on that with massive merchandising (Garcia says together they still are creating six or seven new products a month) and even animated shows like Slam City that feature The Rock as a character.
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."
For a while, he says, he bought into that, in part because he did not have the high-level industry contacts he could turn to for advice. “Then that started to not feel good to me. It reached a point of, ‘I’m not feeling authentic.’ “
"After [2010’s] Tooth Fairy,” says Garcia, “we recognized that Dwayne was moving away from his core of who he was.”
First they changed publicists. But it was only after a long telephone conversation with Garcia and business manager Howard Altman in 2011 that Johnson realized he had to go further.
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 CAAstrongly cautioned against. (He would do so in April 2011 for Wrestlemania XXVII.) That was when he bolted.
On McMahon’s advice, Johnson spoke to WME’s Ari Emanuel, who flew to Johnson’s Florida home the next day and invited him and Garcia 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.
Johnson had contemplated telling the Greek demigod’s story ever since seeing the 1958 version of his story with Steve Reeves. He was developing his own film on the subject when he got a call about starring in an MGM movie.
Soon, he signed on with Brett Ratner as director, and the pair prepared for a grueling four-month shoot in Budapest, Hungary. The challenge wasn’t easy; unlike his supporting role in the Fast & Furious films, this would mean being in peak physical condition, day in and day out — showmanship level, beyond even his tip-top shape for Pain & Gain.
"You think automatically because he’s a body builder, he can do that stuff," says Ratner — in other words, bulk up and stay there for months. “But he had to get up at 2 or 3 in the morning, work out, eat 10 times a day. He had to drink tremendous fluids to keep hydrated. I was always worried about burning him out because it’s hard to maintain that level of energy. The crazy part is, three weeks before we started shooting, he whips his groin muscle and gets a hernia.”
Johnson had suffered a bad injury in his 2013 return to the ring, when he fell and tore both his rectus tendon and adductor muscle while fighting former nemesis John Cena. After seeing a doctor, he opted against surgery. Two days later, by sheer coincidence, something else went wrong.
"I came in for a checkup and pulled my pants down, and the doctor goes, ‘Oh! That’s a hernia,’ " says Johnson. "Your abdominal wall gets weak and your organs push through. The doctor said, ‘You need to lie down,’ and slowly starts to push my intestines back in my stomach. He said, ‘I would really recommend surgery.’ "
That was two weeks before the start of production, and this time Johnson had no choice but to say yes, though the shoot now had to be delayed a month at a cost of $2 million. He was lucky: Other than the delay in shooting, production went well. But soon after his return to Florida, he got devastating news: His Fast & Furious friend Paul Walker had died in a car crash.
"I was driving with Lauren when she immediately turned very quiet and was looking at me, studying, wondering if I knew," he recalls of that November day. "I pulled over and looked at my messages and had a moment where I just caught my breath. We said a prayer right then to give his daughter strength — because we had talked about our daughters. That’s what we would talk about. Both of us were divorced, and we talked about the power of being a dad and the strong connection of a dad and his girl. Then once we got home, we started bawling."
The following day, Johnson spoke to NBCUniversal vice chairman Ron Meyer, and the studio began the long process of figuring out what to do. “I had one day of shooting left, and we still have one day left, which we’ll shoot in a month or two,” says Johnson. As for Walker, he thinks about him a lot. “He was a beautiful man, and in that crazy world, that’s really something.”
When not filming, Johnson gets up at 4 a.m., does around 30 minutes of cardio, then grabs breakfast (his first of six daily meals) before hitting the weights. Working from his base in Fort Lauderdale, he oversees a fledgling production company, the appropriately named 7 Bucks Entertainment, with a five-man staff there and other employees in Los Angeles and London, pushing into film and TV.
He has a new HBO series, Ballers, a sports-related Entourage in which he will appear as a sports agent, that starts shooting in the fall; and Wake Up Call, a reworked version of his canceled TNT reality-competition series The Hero, where he will help people turn their lives around.
