MUMBAI: Hollywood star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has been told to lose weight, drop his stage name and stop talking about wrestling if he wants to make it in Hollywood.
The Fast and Furious star rose to fame in the mid-1990s as a regular performer with the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), adopting the moniker “The Rock” and becoming one of the franchise’s most recognizable wrestlers before moving on to feature films of the Scorpion King in 2001’s The Mummy Returns, reports femalefirst.co.uk.
Now, however, Johnson has revealed that he’s been asked to make some serious changes if he wants to be taken seriously as an actor. Speaking on ‘CBS Sunday Morning’, he said: “They said, ‘Okay, great.’ But now here’s what you need to do: You need to stop exercising so much. You need to lose weight. You can’t call yourself The Rock. There is no struggle to speak of. Let’s stay away from all that.
Host Tracey Smith then asked him: “Is that all the stuff they told you? ‘Don’t be that anymore’?” and the star replied: “Exactly. So, I tried this, Tracy, I tried to get smaller, to lose weight. It felt wrong.”
Tracy then asked, “And after you started being yourself?” and he explained, “That was it. When that happened, a strange thing happened: Hollywood agreed with me. And years later I’m sitting here with you.”
Johnson landed his first starring role, reprising his portrayal of the Scorpion King for the 2002 spin-off of the same name, and his Hollywood career took off.
He eventually landed a lucrative recurring role in the Fast and Furious franchise, as well as leading the cast of action films such as San Andreas and Skyscraper.
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