Dwayne Johnson Was Ordered To Lose Weight And Change Name If He Wanted A Career In Hollywood: "It All Felt Wrong"

Dwayne Johnson was once ordered to lose weight, drop his stage name and stop talking about wrestling if he wanted to make it in Hollywood.

Speaking on CBS Sunday Morning recently, Johnson explained: "They said, 'Okay, great. But now here's what you have to do: You have to stop working out as much. You have to lose weight. You can't call yourself The Rock. You can't talk about wrestling. Let's stay away from all that.'"

Johnson shot to fame back in the mid-1990s as a regular performer with the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). He adopted the moniker The Rock and went on to become one of the franchise's most recognisable wrestlers before making a crossover to movies with a role as the Scorpion King in 2001's The Mummy Returns.

Correspondent Tracy Smith then asked Johnson: "These are all the things they told you? 'Don't be this anymore?"

The Rock: "That's right. So, I tried that, Tracy, I tried getting smaller, losing weight. It all felt wrong."

Smith: "And once you started being yourself?"

The Rock: "That was it. When that happened, a funny thing happened: Hollywood conformed around me. And years later, I'm sitting here with you."

In the interview, Johnson also addressed the oft-talked idea of him running for President: he's not interested.

“Yes. It is off the table," he said. "I will say this because it requires a B-side to this." 

He added, “I love our country and everyone in it. I also love being a daddy. And that’s the most important thing to me is being a daddy, number one, especially during this time, this critical time in my daughters’ lives. Because I know what it was like to be on the road and be so busy that I was absent for a lot of years in my first daughter’s, growing up in this critical age, at this critical time in their life.”

He said that while being “CEO sounds great,” “the number one thing I want to be is daddy. That’s it.”

— BANG SHOWBIZ

Photo: TPG News/Click Photos