Dwayne Johnson has reached a “turning point” in his acting career.
Wrestler-turned-movie star plays real-life MMA fighter Mark Kerr in sports drama The smashing machine and he admitted that the job “completely changed” his life.
During an appearance on The Hollywood ReporterIt is Rewards Discussion podcast, he explained: “Smashing Machine has completely changed my life in ways I didn’t anticipate, because of what it represents.”
THE Jumanji The star continued, “It represents, to me, listening to your gut, your instinct, that little voice. Sometimes in life you think you’re capable of something, but you don’t really know it. And sometimes it takes people around you to say, ‘Come on, you could do it.'”
“Smashing Machine also represents a turning point in my career that I had wanted for a long time: for the first time in my career – more than 20 years since the release of The Scorpion King – I made a film to challenge myself and to really tear myself apart and go somewhere else, disappear and transform myself,” he added.
“And not once did I think about the box office,” Dwayne said, adding, “Even though we didn’t do well [at the box office]or as good as we wanted it to be, it was good because it simply represented what I had done for myself.
“Maybe it was because I was an only child, but all the things I had experienced as a child and teenager – the deportation, my mother tried to kill herself two months after we were deported and I pulled her out of the middle of the highway, a whole bunch of things happened – I had refused to explore all that on film,” said the Moana explained the star.
“For years I was making other films that were big and fun, Jumanji And Moanawith a happy ending, and I still love it,” he said.
But then he compared The smashing machine and added. “But what it represented was, ‘Oh, wait, I can do what I love, which is tell stories, but I could also take all of this and have a place to put it.’
“Anyway, smashing machineas you can see, was the opportunity of a lifetime that changed my life,” concluded Dwayne Johnson.
