Dwayne Johnson has reached a “turning point” in his acting career.
The wrestler-turned-movie star plays real-life MMA fighter Mark Kerr in the sports drama Smash Machine and he has admitted that the job “completely changed” his life.
During a performance at The Hollywood Reporter‘s Price talk podcast, he explained, “Smashing Machine completely changed my life in ways I didn’t anticipate because of what it represents.”
The Jumanji star continued, “It represents, to me, listening to your gut, to your instinct, to that little voice. Sometimes in life you think you’re capable of something, but you don’t quite know it. And sometimes it takes people around you going, ‘Come on, you could do this.’
“Smashing Machine also represents a turning point in my career that I’ve wanted for a long time: for the first time in my career – 20 plus years since The Scorpion King came out – I made a film to challenge myself and to really tear myself up and go somewhere else and disappear and transform,” he added.
“And not once did I think about the box office,” claimed Dwayne, adding, “Even though we didn’t do well [at the box office]or as good as we wanted, it was okay because it just represented what I did for me.”
“Maybe it was because I was an only child, but all the things I’d experienced as a child and as a teenager – eviction, my mother trying to take her own life two months after we got evicted, and me pulling her out of the middle of the freeway, a whole lot of things happened – I had refused to explore any of that on film.” Moana star explained.
“For years I wanted to make these other movies that were big and fun, Jumanji and Moanawith a happy ending, and I still love that,” he said.
But then he compared Smash Machine and added. “But what this represented was, ‘Oh wait, I can do what I love, which is tell stories, but I could also take all these things and have a place to put them’.”
“Anyway, Smash Machineas you can see was an opportunity of a lifetime that changed my life,” concluded Dwayne Johnson.
