In his new film The Smashing Machine, The Rock turns away from macho materialism towards nuance and creativity. The shift is more important than you think
Hey, you know who’s huge? Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. The wrestler and actor is a massive star, but also a “massive” star, with his hulking, manly enormousness a significant part of his global appeal.
But at the moment he’s slightly less huge than usual. He got even bigger for his new film The Smashing Machine, gaining 14kg of extra muscle to play real-life MMA fighter Mark Kerr in a performance that led to early Oscar buzz. But now that he’s out promoting it, he’s a surprisingly slender figure.
It’s all relative, of course – a slimmed-down Dwayne Johnson is still the size of a semi-detached house, and if you weren’t used to the usual enormous version you’d see him and go, “Wow, that guy’s big!” – but there’s less Rock than once there was. His new physique is for another film with Smashing Machine director Benny Safdie, an upcoming adaptation of 1970s children’s book Lizard Music, in which rather than portraying any kind of giant, muscular, wisecracking brawler, Johnson will play an eccentric 75-year-old with a chicken on his head.
Johnson is an influential figure, particularly with young men (those Under Armor tops don’t sell themselves) — he’s a self-made multimillionaire (his production company Seven Bucks Productions is named after his bank balance before he made it big) who combines a megawatt movie-star smile with the ability to cheerfully throw people through walls. He posts a lot online about how hard he works, whether in the gym or the boardroom, and very much gives the impression of being a man who has it all.
And for a while, he seemed determined to behave like a 12-year-old’s idea of a huge movie star. Two projects in particular, Black Adam and Red One, were allegedly plagued with problems that seemed to be caused by egotistical dick-swinging — there were stories on the set of Red One of hold-ups caused by his late arrival to set, as well as PAs being tasked with getting rid of bottles of Dwayne Johnson wee (two allegations that he has, at least in part, conceded).
In 2025, young men are increasingly presented with content from toxic influencers showing off about having lots of money and big muscles – and who claim to have everything figured out, a tantalising prospect for a youngster. In 2023, for instance, the anti-far-right charity Hope Not Hate found that 80 per cent of British boys aged 16-17 had viewed content by Andrew Tate, a man who has been charged with rape and human trafficking.
So it’s more important than ever that there are alternative male role models. Enter The Rock 2.0: here we have a man who is vastly more wealthy, successful, handsome, beloved and charismatic than Tate who is discovering he has ambitions greater than being a millionaire beefcake. He’s described making The Smashing Machine as “the first time in my career that I’ve not thought about the box office once”. He’s showing vulnerability, openness to learn and – hopefully – a willingness to use a proper toilet.
For a man who has spent 15 years specialising in formulaic movies that feel cynically put together, this shift towards vulnerability through complex acting roles feels significant.
From boasting about his “four-quadrant movies” and becoming the world’s highest-paid actor, for five of the past 10 years, by playing an interchangeable series of giant bald men, the manliest man alive has now discovered art, creativity and nuance. He’s chosen to shed hard-earned muscle and choose creatively satisfying projects over commercial sure-fire hits. He’s openly trying to improve in ways that don’t just come down to bigger numbers.
And, despite all that vulnerability and relative un-shreddedness, he could still crush any of these manosphere know-nothings to dust with a casual blow of his mighty paws, while out-earning them a thousandfold. It’s a real having-cake-and-eating-it-too situation for Dwayne Johnson – he’s better than those people both in ways that actually matter, and in the ways they thickly judge success.
There’s every chance that, after Lizard Music, he’ll spend six months lifting increasingly heavy weights and make a bunch of extremely stupid films. But for now, it seems like the biggest movie star in the world is, despite reducing in mass, growing.
