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Some people will tell you they listen to their gut when making big decisions; others will go with their brain. For Dwayne Johnson, back in 2019, the voice he couldn’t let go of was coming from somewhere behind his ribcage.
“It was sitting back there, and it was just saying, ‘Hey, there’s more, you can do more,’” he tells me on this week’s special Saturday episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. Listening to that voice, Johnson says he asked himself, “‘Can I challenge myself more?’ And the answer came back vehemently, yes, I can. But where do I do it? How do I do it?”
The solution was already in front of him at the time, in the initial conversations he was having with filmmaker Benny Safdie. The director had just released Uncut Gems and had started talking to Johnson about his dream project: a biopic of early mixed-martial-arts fighter Mark Kerr. Both were busy back then, and Johnson remembers them joking, “I don’t know if we do this or not, but we’re going to be buddies.”
Then 2020 happened, and their friendship went sideways along with everything else. As Johnson tells it, Safdie had sent him a yellow Nautica sweater styled like the one the actual Kerr wore in the 2002 documentary on which The Smashing Machine is based, along with a handwritten note. Unfortunately, Johnson never got it. (“The mail was weird, life was weird,” Johnson says.) Years later, while Safdie was on the set of Oppenheimer — one of several major movies the director has appeared in as an actor over the last decade — he asked co-star Emily Blunt, Johnson’s good friend, if she could find out if Johnson had “ghosted” him.
“He thought I was being an asshole,” Johnson says. After Blunt reconnected the pair, that burgeoning friendship, interrupted by the pandemic, picked right back up again. “As soon as he was wrapped with Oppenheimer, he came out, and we sat down, and he said something that I really believed. He said, ‘I have not stopped thinking about this movie ever since you and I discussed it. I’d love to make it.’ I said, ‘Me neither.’”
I found it especially fascinating to talk to Johnson about audiences, something he’s thought about possibly more than any other movie star. The 53-year-old, of course, broke out as a professional wrestler nicknamed “The Rock” in the late 1990s, electrifying sold-out audiences as one of the era’s most significant (and most arrogant) heels. In the 2000s, Johnson became an onscreen actor — his first role was as the Scorpion King in 2001’s The Mummy Returns opposite his friend Brendan Fraser. By the 2010s, he was headlining his own movies and elevating multiple franchises, including Fast & Furious, to blockbuster heights.
He tells me that Blunt, who first starred with Johnson in Jungle Cruise, used to push back against his philosophy of “audience first” — the idea that you build a career around what audiences want, not your own interests. After making The Smashing Machine, he’s found an entirely different way of looking at it, and says something I honestly never thought I’d hear from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
“I mean this so respectfully when I say this — the audience comes last,” he says. “Because when you do it for yourself, then it’s like, hey, I did this thing, maybe you’ll like it. As opposed to trying to do something for them, and around every corner, you’re chasing what a trend is — and what might be good — and what this audience might like or this sector. I feel the more enriching experience is me first, and give the audience my full self.”
The Smashing Machine, somewhat infamously, didn’t hit with audiences the way so many other Johnson projects have. Released in October by A24, it grossed just $11.4 million in North America and a shade over $20 million worldwide. But no one involved in The Smashing Machine has let the poor ticket sales get in the way of a movie they love, continuing to promote the picture and campaign for awards throughout the fall. And while Johnson will be back in more familiar territory for audiences soon, with another Jumanji sequel and a live-action Moana on the way in 2026, it’s clear that his period of pushing boundaries, of experimenting with what Dwayne Johnson can mean onscreen, is far from over.
“I reached this point in my life and career where I don’t want to make things that are forgettable,” he tells me, before paraphrasing a quote from Rick Rubin: “No one is waiting around for something to be done the same.”
