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 Dwayne Johnson
Interview By: Michael Dance If Dwayne Johnson likes one thing, it's this: a challenge. How does he choose movies? "If the script gets me excited, and I think I can be challenged," he says. Why did he decide to star in Richard Kelly's Southland Tales? Because he thought the director's previous film, Donnie Darko, was "an interesting movie - it was very challenging." In Southland Tales, he plays a movie star stricken with amnesia. "I thought that he was just a very challenging character to play," Johnson explains. The philosophy has served him well over his relatively short but highly successful career. Over four years ago, "The Rock" retired from wrestling and launched his movie career, starring in the successful spin-off of the Mummy franchise, The Scorpion King. Since then he has been embraced by the average moviegoing public by (A) actually being a good actor with a charming screen presence, and (B) not starring exclusively in action roles. In other words...challenging himself. Post-Scorpion King, his first role was The Rundown, a seemingly typical action movie except that his character was a pacific who didn't like to use guns. In Be Cool, he played a gay bodyguard. And this very fall he starred in The Game Plan, a Disney family comedy that has become his highest-grossing film since The Scorpion King. Now, he stars in Southland Tales, which is about as genre-bending as it gets. "I always say that to me, it's a comedy," Johnson says of the film. "It's a dark comedy about the end of the world, and how people, very specifically in Los Angeles, would react. I will say that I loved [the script]. I thought it was great, it was intriguing, it was different, it was funny." The amnesiac celebrity he plays, Boxer Santaros, is not necessarily based on any Hollywood type he's come across. "Well, not to a large degree," Johnson clarifies, "because he has amnesia, and he has no idea who he is, or what he is. The only thing he really knows is that he's written a screenplay. And also that the world is going to come to an end. It's going to begin here in Los Angeles...He had multiple personalities, and a wife and a girlfriend, and he's a paranoid schizophrenic actor." At this last part, he grins. "Well, if that's the case, then I tapped into a couple of friends I know." Southland Tales has grown to be a sharply divisive movie; it received a frankly terrible reception at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, and has since been re-edited and cut down. Some reviewers are loving it; others continue to call it a mess. Johnson, perhaps buoyed by his recent success with The Game Plan, doesn't seem worried, although remains realistic about its prospects. "Whoever finds this movie, whatever small audience finds this movie, I think ... |
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