Dwayne Johnson, better known as 'The Rock', is the highest-paid actor in the world, averaging $20 million per movie.
Dwayne Johnson's films have grossed more than $10.5 billion on five continents, making him one of the highest-grossing movie stars of all time. In his teens, he was a petty thief until he found redemption in football (he even went pro in Canada). He suffered from depression, but wrestling brought him out of obscurity and made him a star. Dwayne Johnson later found acting and became a billionaire celebrity with 262 million followers on Instagram.
Dwayne Johnson doesn't use his nickname much like he doesn't like it, but everyone knows him as 'The Rock'. His name is Dwayne Johnson, he became known as one of the most important professional wrestlers in history (he retired in 2019) and, for 20 years, he became one of the most successful actors and businessmen in Hollywood.
Just by having his name in the credits of a movie, that production becomes a guaranteed success. In fact, Johnson is the highest-paid actor in the world, earning a figure of over $20 million per performance. And why if many do not consider him a great actor? Easy: His films have grossed more than $10.5 billion worldwide, making him one of the highest-grossing movie stars of all time.
With 260 million followers on Instagram, he is also one of the most popular social media characters in the world. But what is his success? Simply because he is a guy with great charisma who reaches absolutely all audiences: children, young people, adults, seniors, men, and women. Very few celebrities can say that.
But not always everything was like this for 'The Rock'. His childhood and his youth were marked by family instability. Dwayne Douglas Johnson was born on May 2, 1972, in Hayward, California. His father was African-American wrestler Rocky Johnson and his maternal grandfather was the Samoan wrestler known as the 'Big Boss' Peter Maivia. When he was six years old, his father was already teaching him the basics of wrestling. Johnson, then, paid a high price for being part of a nomadic, almost circus-like family: he lived in Hawaii, Tennessee, and New Zealand, before his family settled in the state of Pennsylvania. “I had a somewhat hard youth for years; we eked out every paycheck my father received, moving to a different city every time my father got a new job,” he recalls.
Also, as a high school student, Dwayne was arrested for bullying, petty theft and even forging checks, all before he was 16 years old. “When I was 14 years old, we lived in Hawaii in a small apartment and got kicked out. That's why I did stupid things, but at the same time it was like a motivation to promise myself that I would never live something like that again in my life, let them evict me.
In high school, in Bethlehem, Dwayne Johnson demonstrated his potential in boxing and football. He was even one of the top ten high school football players in his state. With that credit, he earned a scholarship to the University of Miami and the honor of being the first member of his family to attend a university.
After playing football for four years at the University of Miami, the NFL turned him down to a professional team. He then went to the Canadian League where he was part of the Calgary Stampeders. At 23, Dwayne found himself living again in his parents' small apartment, battling depression. “Those were very dark moments for me because I was breaking down from rejection and I felt like a loser. I fell into a deep depression and I remember all I wanted to do was clean the walls. I took a cleaner and a rag, and for days I cleaned. It was the only thing I could control,” he recalls. It was then that he decided to dedicate himself to wrestling, to become one of the figures most appreciated by fans of that practice, thanks to his charisma and showmanship. “My knee-jerk reaction to sadness was to look for some kind of action, and for me, as boring and cliché as it sounds, it was to start going to a gym. Exercising gives you a sense of control over your body and can help diffuse the powerful control of emotions that blanket your mind."
Thanks to his constitution and disciplined work with the weights, Johnson achieved an admirable body. Thus he became known as 'The Rock', to become the biggest televised superstar that has ever been seen in North American wrestling. As a professional wrestler, he made a fortune, but it would be his next activity, acting, that would make him a household name around the world. After his first film role as The Scorpion King (2002), in The Mummy Returns (2001), Johnson has starred in dozens of films, including Fast and Furious, Baywatch (2017), Jumanji (2019), and now, Currently, the most recent on the billboard, Jungle Cruise.
To complete, Johnson is not only a movie star. He is also a successful businessman who revolutionized the entertainment industry. Since 2013, together with his ex-wife, Dany García, he co-founded the production company Seven Bucks Productions, with which he creates original content for various platforms and, in another branch that is also very lucrative, has just launched a tequila brand called Teremana. That same year, Forbes magazine named him number 25 among the 100 most powerful celebrities on the planet, a list from which he has not left to date. In 2015, Muscle & Fitness magazine named him the "Man of the Century." And in 2016, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In other words: a 'Rock' of gold.
