While I was picking up Essence Magazine with my other fav man Will Smith on the cover guess who I saw on the cover of Details Magazine. Yup our boy Dwayne I almost flipped out. Anyways I got the scans up
in the gallery and you can read the full article below.
On sale now January/February 2005 Details magazine-webmistress

The Rock

Inside Dwayne’s World By Laura Brown

It wasn’t quite Jesus on the mount, but for the people of Samoa, it was a
very big day all the same. Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, who is
half-Samoan by birth, had accepted an invitation to come to the Pacific-island
nation last summer and be made a seiuli, or chief, by His Highness
Malietoa Tanamafili II. Johnson figured he’d draw a modest crowd, especially
since only 40,000 people live on the island. As it turned out, 50,000 showed up“Island love,” says Johnson, sitting in the back of a chauffeur-driven
SUV, cruising around Manhattan. He smiles at the memory. “There’s nothing
like it.”

Fifty thousand Samoans can’t be wrong: There is something about the Rock that
makes people want to project their dreams onto his billboard-size pecs. Once the
“People’s Champion” in the wrestling ring, the 32-year-old actor is
now the People’s Action Hero. Or at least he should be. Sly and Arnold and
Jean-Claude have creaked offstage, and Vin Diesel can’t seem to find the
box-office cojones to seize the crown outright. The title is the Rock’s for the
taking.

So how to explain Johnson’s role in Be Cool, the upcoming sequel to the
1995 Elmore Leonard adaptation Get Shorty? In the film, he plays a gay
bodyguard who recites monologues from the modern pom-pom classic Bring It On
and spanks himself in front of a full-length mirror while wearing a satin
bodysuit and hitting a high note Mariah Carey would envy. America?ever
unnerved by the perpetual threat of an Al Qaeda encore and depressed over the
shambles in Iraq?is primed to embrace a new Glock-toting one-liner machine.
And Johnson picks this moment to turn girlie-man? Is the Rock trying to tell us
something?

“The gayest thing about me?” he ponders. “Probably all the gay
porn I did. Everyone was nicknamed Stretch after me. Oh, that’s terrible.“

As it happens, Johnson’s turn opposite John Travolta’s reprise as the mob-grown
Hollywood player Chili Palmer is greater than the sum of its camp flourishes.
It’s not exactly Kiss of the Spider Woman, but it is more thoughtfully
motivated than the Wigstock capering on his two highly rated Saturday Night
Live appearances (he donned a dress both times). The Rock is trying to act.
In these red-state days of torpedoed gay-marriage amendments, such a role could
prove to be a misstep. Or perhaps, as a football player turned eyebrow-arching
ring villain turned popular hero-of-color, the Rock can smell exactly what he’s
cooking.

Johnson once went to the stadium, but now the stadium comes to him. On a brief
hiatus from filming the marines-in-space epic Doom (based on the
best-selling video game) in Prague, he is in New York, looking for CDs.
“Can’t remember the last time I browsed,” he says wryly. He wants to
make a “quick stop” but picks Tower Records, where an uninterrupted
shopping experience seems like a pipe dream. Wearing a simple uniform of jeans,
a black T-shirt, and a silver chain, he points out that a baseball cap doesn’t
really help to disguise you when you’re six foot four and there are action
figures in your likeness.

As he sets out in search of Willie Nelson (“I own one of his Trigger
guitars?one of only 100. So cool!”), Ray Charles, and Lil’ John, Johnson
stops dead in front of Rod Stewart’s It Had to Be You… The Great American
Songbook. “It’s fantastic!” he exclaims. “Songs 2 and 11. I’m
telling you.” And that’s when the people begin to flock. Recognition,
followed by awe, then a truly weird loss of physical coordination, washes over
the clump of customers in the Top 20 section. Soon Johnson is surrounded by a
dozen or so people, four telling him that their mother loves him, a few
frenziedly tearing the plastic wrap from Walking Tall DVDs for him to
sign, and one proactive teen in a baggy shirt and falling-down pants imploring
him, “Dude… just keep rocking. Wow, man, the Rock!”

Johnson has always been a one-man show. He puts it down to only-child syndrome:
“Mom would set up the video recorder, and I used to go from Michael Jackson
dances to my favorite movie monologues?Rocky II, Rocky III.”
There’s also the DNA factor: His grandfather, “High Chief” Peter
Maivia, was a star in the old World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling
Entertainment), and his father, Rocky Johnson, was a WWF tag-team champion. The
high-laced-boot business didn’t appeal to him initially, which is why Johnson
wanted to parlay his four years as a star defensive tackle at the University of
Miami into a career spent pile-driving millionaire quarterbacks into the
manicured lawns of the NFL. When three exploded disks in his spine killed the
dream, he limped into the low-rent Canadian Football League for $175 a week
before getting cut from his team and going home to his girlfriend (now wife),
Dany Garcia, in Florida.

There, facing the abyss, Johnson saw the light: He would follow genetic destiny
after all. In 1996 he joined the WWF, and realizing his good-guy act was going
nowhere, he became a heel?a bad guy. By 2000, thanks to his hot-fudge
baritone, that hammy eyebrow, and the protein-rich physique, Johnson was on the
cover of Newsweek with a New York Times No. 1 best seller, The
Rock Says…, in his back pocket. Pop-culture phenoms?especially
camera-ready ones?can’t stay off the big screen for long, and Johnson soon
found himself leading a dog-headed army through the desert in a short scene in The
Mummy Returns., Practically before the director yelled cut, Universal was
thinking spin-off to capitalize on Johnson’s obvious run-roar-impale appeal. A
year later, he had his own vehicle, The Scorpion King, for which he
earned $5.5 million?the biggest check ever for a first-time top-billing actor.
The film grossed a modest $160 million worldwide?hardly a blockbuster, but
enough to send the message that the Rock was on his way.

Unfortunately, in the films since, Johnson has not yet found his groove. He
stripped down from 270 pounds to a less scene-hogging 245 for the 2003
action-comedy The Rundown, which was followed directly by Walking
Tall, but neither played beyond his base. Those who have worked with him and
have experienced his blitzkrieg of charisma aren’t worried about his future.
“He makes you feel better about yourself. It’s like the quality of a great
quarterback,” says Vince Vaughn, who plays the oily music manager protected
by the Rock’s mincing bodyguard in Be Cool. “He’s got that quality
that when you’re talking to him, you’re the only person on the planet,”
says Johnny Knoxville, his co-star in Walking Tall. “It’s darn near
Clintonesque.”

“I have a joke I always do,” Johnson announces. “Wanna hear
it?” He has just ordered what could be called the brute-force special at
Del Frisco’s steak house in midtown Manhattan?a shrimp cocktail, the rib eye,
grilled onions, a baked potato, skillet potatoes, and steamed broccoli. He is
slightly more fragrant than earlier, having spritzed on a little Jil Sander, and
the scent is actually the trigger for the running gag he now wants to confess.

“People ask me what I’m wearing and I say, ‘It’s called Come to Me.’ And
they say, ‘Come to Me? That’s a weird name. Can I smell it?’ ” Beat. ”
‘Sure?smell like come to you?’ “

Bad ribald jokes are the privilege of any whoppingly muscled $15
million?per?movie star?and in any case they’re offset by the fact that the
Rock is genuinely, goofily funny. It’s the somewhat un-A-list questions he
intermixes with his jokes that give pause: What’s Nicole Kidman like? Does
Jennifer Garner really work out at 4:30 A.M.? The Paris Hilton sex tape?is it
good? What’s Be Cool like? (He hasn’t seen it yet.) Johnson is not even
tabloid-shy enough to deflect subjects like cosmetic surgery. He’ll gladly tell
you, for instance, that he once had liposuction. “Oh, yeah, I had some fat
sucked out,” he says, pointing to his ribs. “I was walking around with
my shirt off all the time, and it’s such a big thing in the wrestling
business.” Not only that, he’d do it again. “Botox your balls, excuse
my language, if you want,” he says. “As long as you’re not hurting
anybody.”

Johnson would know a little about that: He has a temper. It’s not what it was in
the old days, but it flared briefly last year when he was Punk’d by
Kutcher and Company. An explosion due to “faulty electronics” was set
off in what the Rock thought was his trailer, and he was blamed. He had to be
physically restrained from de-spleening one of the conspirators before the prank
was revealed. “Back in the day I used to get into fights a lot,” he
admits, stabbing what’s left of his steak. “But I’m a little bit more in
control than I once was. I’m really not in a position anymore where people are
that bad. When I was younger, it was different, but now it’s so rare that people
are ignorant or belligerent. They’re so kind and happy to say hello. I
mean,” he starts to laugh, “why would I want to punch the shit out of
them?”

Fisticuffs are a big part of the Doom shoot in Prague, and Johnson is not
really looking forward to returning to Eastern Europe. When he doesn’t have to
zip between moons in a souped-up space-copter, he retreats to his hotel
room?”with a copy of Big ‘Uns. Oh, that’s terrible. I’m
sorry.” There, he sits around eating pizza and watching the action network,
Fox News. “I love Fox,” he declares. “I love their balls, I love
their edginess. I love that they can make jokes about things. You know, ‘This
car chase ended… how all of them end.’ “

Car chases are clich?s, no question, but the movie variety pays an awful lot of
bills for guys like the Rock. Just not as much if you insist on wearing
something frilly.

credit: Details