For much of his career, Dwayne Johnson has been stuck between the Rock and a hard place. In the early years of his transition from body-slamming World Wrestling Entertainment heavy to marquee movie star, he was still being billed under his nom de ring. Even once he retired that moniker, he seemed to be lugging behind him a persona from which he might never be free. There are people-pleasers and then there is this affable brawler-turned-actor, who appears to regard the contentment of the world’s multiplex-goers as his personal responsibility. Whether in vehicles comic (Central Intelligence, Baywatch), family-oriented (Jumanji, Jungle Cruise), four-wheeled (the Fast & Furious series) or disaster-based (San Andreas, Skyscraper), he is a rip-roaring razzle-dazzler, shiny of scalp and tooth, and so colossal that he isn’t merely the circus showman but the whole damn big top too.
Not that he hasn’t been lavishly remunerated for all that heavy lifting. He can out-grin and out-gross Tom Cruise: Johnson has 392 million Instagram followers to Cruise’s 15 million, and was Forbes magazine’s highest-paid actor for five of the last nine years. That includes 2024, when he pocketed $88m. (Cruise didn’t make the top 20 that year.)
But Johnson is the first to admit there has been trouble in paradise for some time. “I’ve been in this space for years where I wanted to do more,” the 53-year-old actor tells me over video call from Los Angeles.
Things came to a pretty pass last year when his much-despised Christmas comedy-adventure Red One, for which he reportedly earned around $50m for playing Santa’s head of security, not only flopped spectacularly (it grossed $186m worldwide on a $250m budget) but was accompanied by stories of Johnson’s poor on-set behaviour: rumours of persistent tardiness (which he has denied), or his habit of peeing in bottles and leaving assistants to dispose of them (which he accepted). It’s one reason to feel disconcerted when he arrives 25 minutes late to our interview. On the plus side, the liquid in his water bottle isn’t yellow.
He clearly wasn’t happy. “I wanted to not only challenge myself but to listen to my gut,” he says. “To really rip myself open. And, quite honestly, I was scared. I’m not a big therapy guy. I’ve had some great conversations with therapists but it’s not the thing I run to. I bottle shit up inside me, like a lot of guys, which I recognise is not the healthiest thing to do.” He shrugs. His tight white shirt, unbuttoned to the chest, seems to stretch and creak. “Then I said: Wait, I can still do the thing I love, which is acting. But what if there’s something deeper and more meaningful in it for me?”
“Yeah!”
Piping up beside him, in a voice as chipper as Johnson’s is ruminative and rumbling, is the actor’s own personal hype-man: Benny Safdie, the feted 39-year-old film-maker who has helped facilitate Johnson’s swerve away from disposable entertainment to high-calibre cinema. Safdie made his name alongside his brother Josh co-directing full-blown cinematic panic-attacks such as Good Time and Uncut Gems. Now he has gone solo for The Smashing Machine, in which Johnson plays Mark Kerr, the real-life mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter who amassed a fortune pummelling opponents – and, as his might began to wane, getting pummelled – in eye-gouging, head-kicking Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) bouts.
Johnson has known Kerr since the late 1990s, when they would bump into one another on the circuit. “There was a lot of connective tissue between MMA in the late 1990s and what I was doing. Same arenas, same gyms. Same demons, too.” Around 2008, he became obsessed with the documentary The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr, which showed Kerr at his euphoric highs and pitiful lows. The actor sensed that a dramatised film of that story would not only be compelling but could provide a solution to his brewing dissatisfaction at having acted himself into a corner. Playing Kerr, he might just be able to cage-fight his way out of his own gilded cage.
And so it has proved. For The Smashing Machine, Johnson spent several hours each day having the prosthetics applied which would turn him into Kerr, but that isn’t the only reason he is unrecognisable in the film. With Safdie’s encouragement, he also located within himself an actor no one knew existed. He had previously departed from form only twice: he was used for novelty value in Southland Tales, Richard Kelly’s maligned follow-up to Donnie Darko, and was entertaining as a dumb-lug bodybuilder turned kidnapper in Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. The Smashing Machine, though, feels fully driven by his hunger as an actor.
Near the start of the film, Kerr finds it impossible to imagine what it might feel like to lose. The remainder of the movie shows what happens when this born champion is confronted by his own fallibility. Banjaxed by injuries and an addiction to painkillers, his chaotic relationship with his girlfriend Dawn (played by Johnson’s Jungle Cruise co-star Emily Blunt) starts to unravel. In the process, The Smashing Machine becomes an unusual proposition: a film about a winner who must learn how to lose, and a loving couple who probably shouldn’t be together.
Safdie doesn’t quibble with that description, but nor does he exactly embrace it. “I still want the audience to feel good at the end,” he says. That they do is largely down to Johnson’s charisma, which is less ingratiating now that it is complicated by his character’s pain and self-doubt. One scene in particular is a revelation. As Dawn goads and taunts him during an argument at home, Kerr – who, despite being the size of a bookcase, is as gentle and softly spoken as a librarian – lets rip, tearing the kitchen door apart as if he were ripping a tissue in two. The truly impressive moment, though, occurs seconds earlier, when his eyes drain of life and he becomes chillingly still.
“I’ve never played a scene like that before,” says Johnson, hushed by the memory of it. How did it feel? “Like not acting but living in the moment. You go elsewhere. You don’t know where you’re going and you don’t know how you come back.” Safdie remembers it well: “Afterwards, we were all very emotional,” he says. “Crying and going: ‘Oh my God.’ Because you can’t express those sorts of feelings unless you’ve felt them before.”
This is the first of several times that Safdie hints at the personal struggles and frustrations that his lead actor brought to the picture. “When we met,” he tells Johnson, “I saw behind your eyes this desire to really explore something about yourself.”
I ask whether there were indeed autobiographical elements to playing Kerr. “In what way?” Johnson asks, stiffening slightly. Safdie leaps in to answer for him. “Well, yeah, right, because there’s that thing of having to put on a certain face for the crowd, which I knew Dwayne felt too.” He turns to Johnson again. “I knew you were telling and discovering a part of yourself also.”
The actor takes up the idea. “It’s the challenge of having to live up to an image. I can empathise with Mark in that. There’s this image of you and, as it forms, people keep piling shit on: ‘You can do it. Now do it like this. And here’s more, and more. Now come over here and do this thing, and that thing.’” I start to see the sisyphean side to this Rock.
Like Kerr, Johnson has come to accept his own vulnerability. In a time of political tyrants and would-be strongmen, when the US president’s go-to insults are “loser” and “failing”, that puts The Smashing Machine out of step with the prevailing culture. And not only the political one. Safdie and Johnson both work in an industry that does not brook failure: flop on your opening weekend, fall short of your expected box office gross, and you can become a pariah. Colleagues will cold shoulder you at Los Angeles lunch spots. People will lose your number.
Competition is endemic in Hollywood. Like it or not, Safdie himself is squaring up for a battle with his own brother: Josh Safdie has also directed a new sport drama – Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet as a fictional 1950s table-tennis champion loosely based on Marty Mauser – which is out soon through the same distributor (A24). The trade paper Variety predicts that Marty Supreme will dominate most of next year’s Oscar categories, including best picture and best director, while it places The Smashing Machine’s chances mainly in the acting slots.
“Look, Josh is my brother, you know?” he laughs, wriggling in his seat. “I love my brother. I think it’s cool that we both have movies out. I was joking with a friend of mine about how there are always these boxing brothers like the Klitschko and Charlo brothers. And he admitted to me: ‘I know this is wrong, but when they fight, I always wanna see them beat each other up’. And I can kinda see a little bit of that happening!” Should things turn ugly on the red carpet, at least Benny Safdie can count on Johnson to back him up, whereas all his brother has is little Timmy Chalamet.
For once, the pressure is off Johnson himself. “You know, I’ll share this with you,” he says, making me lean closer to the screen. “This is the first time in my career that I’ve not thought about box office once. And I like that. I appreciate it. With the other films, the big ones, the four-quadrant movies, it’s pressurised. Sure, I love making the Jumanjis and Moanas. But there’s something so freeing about this process. We want this movie to open well and hope a lot of people like it. But for that not to be the thing … What a difference.”
Ordinarily, he would be quaking on the eve of a new picture coming out. “It’s a scary time because so much effort and money goes into the opening weekend here in the States. Then it’s: ‘How will it hold up? What will it do internationally? Maybe we should change that scene because it’d play better in Asia …’ I make all these big movies, and some have been really good and some not so good at all. But this was one for me.” Gesturing to Safdie, he amends his remark: “For us.”
Having tasted freedom, how can he ever go back to his old way of working? “Well, that’s a smart question. I feel like I need to have a conversation about that with my therapist Benny here.” They laugh together. But the point stands. With The Smashing Machine, it may be Johnson’s persona which has finally been smashed for good.