Early in His Career Dwayne Johnson Was Told To Be More Like George Clooney, Johnny Depp, and Will Smith
When Dwayne Johnson first started his journey in Hollywood as an actor, he was advised to do things that were just against his nature. If he would have actually listened to those people and gone in the direction they wanted him to go, he would not have been the ultra-successful actor that he’s become.
Johnson’s first film was The Mummy Returns in 2001, and it’s amazing to see how far he’s come. During a recent interview on Good Morning America the actor shared that in the beginning, in an effort to get more movie roles, he was advised to be more like George Clooney, Johnny Depp, and Will Smith. He explained:
“I tried to think of times in the past [filming Black Adam] where I felt really constrained. And like I had the chains on me. And people telling me, ‘Well you can do it like this, you have to do it like that.’ For example, when I first got to Hollywood, many moons ago I was told -- out of the world of pro wrestling — I was told, ‘Well, if you wanna make it if you want to be a star’ — the biggest stars at that time were George Clooney and Johnny Depp and Will Smith. I was told then, ‘You can’t call yourself The Rock. Don’t talk about pro wrestling. You gotta lose weight, go on a diet, you’re too big, don’t go to the gym as much.’
“There were a lot of things like that I was being told and if you don’t know any better you buy into it. And I bought into it for a couple of years before I said, ‘This ends right now. And I’m gonna be myself and at least if I fail, I’m gonna fail being me.’ So, I tapped into that, because a lot of those elements are what surrounds Black Adam’s life. And his existence of being told ‘you have to do it like that.’”
I remember in those early films when Johnson was so much smaller than he is now. The guy is a freakin’ beast now! But, if you look back at those earlier films of his, you can see he was doing what people were telling him to do. Luckily he realized that being himself was the right move to make that that he created his own path to success. It worked!