There’s one thing you can say about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson — he’s big. Yes, the former Miami Hurricanes defensive tackle turned professional wrestler is physically large — officially, he’s a 6-foot-5, 260-pound pile of muscle and tattoos — but his personality and ambitions are also cartoonishly outsized.
When he was in his wrestling prime around the turn of the century, he attracted the biggest audiences WWE ever saw. But for the last 20 years or so, Johnson has been a movie star. After making his debut as a supporting actor in 2001 with The Mummy Returns, he immediately booked his first lead role in that film’s prequel, 2002’s The Scorpion King. In 2011’s Fast Five, he gave the struggling Fast & Furious series a shot in the arm, introducing a new character and transforming the car-chase franchise into the weird semi-spy thriller thing that is scheduled to clock its 10th installment in 2023.
Notice I called Johnson a “movie star” instead of an “actor.” That’s because actors transform themselves for each new role, while movie stars transform each role into a conduit for the persona they’re selling. John Wayne, for example, always played John Wayne, even when he was ostensibly playing Genghis Khan. Next year, people won’t go to see what Luke Hobbs is up to in Fast X, they’ll go to see The Rock drive cars real fast.
Johnson’s larger-than-life persona, and how it got to be so dang big, is the subject of Young Rock, which is probably the first ever biographical comedy series about someone who is not a comedian — or even very funny. It’s 2032, and Johnson is running for president. He appears on a chat show hosted by Randall Park (playing himself, as several people, including Johnson, do in the future-now world of 2032), where he starts telling stories about his life. As each story unfolds we flash back to the appropriate period of Rock lore: Adrian Groulx plays him at age 10, Bradley Constant at 15, and Uli Latukefu as the young adult Rock.
Johnson’s had a pretty interesting life to provide fodder for the show. He was a third-generation wrestler — his father was Rocky “Soul Man” Johnson, the first Black champion in WWE history, and his mother Ata was the daughter of Samoan wrestling legend Peter Maivia. There’s also a colorful cast of characters, including André the Giant (Matthew Willig), The Iron Sheik (Brett Azar), and “Macho Man” Randy Savage (Kevin Makely), just to name a few.
Both Soul Man and The Rock went through the famously wild Memphis wrestling market on their way to stardom. Rocky was a rival of Jerry “The King” Lawler. Later, Johnson would introduce memories of his stint in the Mid-South with the words, “I was working in Memphis, and it was a grind.”
We know the feeling, Rock.
But it must not have been too bad because after two seasons filming in Queensland, Australia, Young Rock moved company to Memphis. The first episode filmed in the Bluff City, “The People Need You,” premiered last Friday. At the end of season 2, Johnson had just lost the 2032 election to Senator Brayden Taft (Michael Torpey). As season 3 dawns, Park, who functions as the audience surrogate who listens to The Rock’s tall tales, has a new show with a co-host he hates. Johnson has gone into seclusion following his election loss, but after a viral video surfaces of The Rock signing a kid’s autograph, Park goes to visit his old friend, who is spending his time puttering around his farm quoting Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech.
The episode’s time jumps and wacky portrayals of real people show that Young Rock didn’t lose a step when it leapt continents. The production values are first-rate — at one point, Downtown’s Front Street is transformed into Saudi Arabia. Johnson recalls the events which led to the downfall of his father’s career, which included an international contract dispute with Vince McMahon (Adam Ray) and a visit to a music video release party for Cyndi Lauper’s (Irish wrestler Becky Lynch) theme song for The Goonies.
Johnson has been pretty open about his ambitions to enter politics, and Young Rock seems designed to burnish his image as a saintly everyman while getting people used to seeing the wrestler/actor as a political candidate. It’s a strategy that has worked before, first with Donald Trump’s stint on another NBC show, The Apprentice. The second time was TV comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was elected president of Ukraine in April 2019 and was then promptly extorted by Trump, who attempted to get him to lie about Hunter Biden in exchange for American military assistance. The incident led to Trump’s first impeachment. Now, Zelenskyy is a hero of democracy, leading his people against the genocidal Russian invasion. Let’s hope The Rock takes after him.
Young Rock is airing on NBC and streaming on Peacock.
