Here is an interesting read it was an interview done by IC Wales in it he talks about the success of Doom, Vin Diesel, Simone and some of his other movie projects:

THERE’S no messing with The Rock, Hollywood’s latest (and most ludicrously- named) action movie star with the Midas touch at the box office.

The former WWF wrestler-turned-film actor, who leapt to fame in The Mummy Returns, recently hit the No 1 spot in American multiplexes once more with Doom, a gritty, shoot-em-up big screen version of the computer video game, opening in the UK this week. And thankfully he has no pretensions about its meaning in the world of celluloid art

“Here’s the thing, I make no bones about what my interpretation of Doom is,” says the man whose real name is actually Dwayne Johnson. “I’m very proud of it, as part of a genre which I haven’t been a part of before, the sci-fi horror genre, and the presentation is pure popcorn.

“Now that’s not to demean the movie in any way, by calling it a popcorn movie. But I’d be mistaken if I thought I could sit here and talk about the incredible journey, the arc of my character.

“From the word go, I knew I wanted to do it. I get to be the big kid that I am anyway, transported to Mars, with big monsters, I get the biggest gun in the history of the movies – and I get to shoot monsters.”

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For the uninitiated, the action of Doom, be it on the computer or cinema screen, takes place at the Olduvai Research Station, a remote scientific facility on Mars where something has gone terribly wrong. A portal has opened into a hellish zoo of demons, imps, barons and hell knights – and they’re not giving it back without a fight.

Basically an excuse to reinvent all those murky, Alien-style sci-fi potboilers where something nasty’s lurking down that dark corridor, Doom is a leave-your- brain-in-the-foyer, testosterone- heavy action romp with plenty of gore and visceral horror.

The Rock is ‘Sarge’, an uncompromising marine sergeant whose zeal for orders skates the edge between enforced morality and pure evil.

Also along for the ride are British actors Rosamund Pike (one-time Bond girl and a million miles from her last film, Pride and Prejudice) and Dexter Fletcher, plus a bunch of assorted American grunts. So why exactly has this unapologetically “popcorn” event proved such a US smash?

“It just seemed like this was the big family movie everybody was going to this autumn,” says 33-year-old Johnson.

“It’s great to be able to say you’ve got the No 1 movie in America. We had a lot of competition around too, so that was great for me, because this is the genre I’ve always enjoyed. I was a big fan of Alien when it first came out, likewise The Thing.

“What I loved about those movies, and hopefully we kind of captured that in Doom, is the atmosphere of tension. You hear things, you don’t necessarily see the monster, and you relied on that. It’s almost like a throwback to the days when you worked hard to get the scare. I was a big fan, and still am.”

With his shaven head and massive muscles easily noticeable even through a smart dark shirt and suit, The Rock is an imposing presence when he enters the room. He’s no dimbo himbo though, and Hollywood has taken to him. He and Vin Diesel (same haircut, same surprisingly artistic demeanour) are currently sharing top honours when it comes to Tinseltown’s most profitable movies – action-adventure, sc-fi and thrillers – having successfully taken on the mantle of their predecessors Arnie and Sly.

Born in San Francisco and raised in Hawaii, Johnson became a third generation professional wrestler, following the World Wrestling Federation careers of his father, Rocky Johnson (the derivation of his alternative moniker), and his grandfather, Samoan High Chief Maivia.

He had a brief career in the Canadian Football League, but after a shoulder injury turned to the world of wrestling. The “People’s Champion” went on to set a record as the six-time WWF Champion.

His co-starring role as Matheyus the Scorpion King in 2001′s The Mummy Returns first brought him to the attention of the entertainment industry, and the character proved such a talking point that the following year he returned in the title role of The Scorpion King, which broke box office records with the biggest April opening of all time in America.

Since then he’s delighted his fans in movies as diverse as Welcome to the Jungle, Walking Tall and Be Cool (the sequel to Get Shorty) in which he played totally against type as a gay bodyguard and aspiring singer. “That movie got mixed reviews,” he’s keen to recall. “But the reviews I got were pretty darned good and I thought, ‘That’s all I care about!’”

He’s had nothing but support from his family over his late entry into the film acting business. “My dad never wanted me to be a wrestler because he came up at a different time in wrestling. It wasn’t as monopolised as it is today. There was no money at all back then. So my family are fans, and very supportive of my career.”

It’s clear that producers and studios trust The Rock enough to try different types of projects now and, like Vin Diesel, he’s most recently been venturing into comedy and family films; the next movie on his to-do list is Daddy’s Girl, from no less than Disney, and it’ll be the first film that he can realistically show his four-year-old daughter, Simone, by his wife of eight years, Dany.

“Does Simone know what daddy does?” he asks rhetorically. “She knows that I make movies, but she’s not aware of the immensity of what movie making is, not yet.

“Universal were nice enough to have edited down scenes from The Scorpion King to scenes she can watch. It’s riding a camel basically.”

As for Daddy’s Girl, he already has the selling point. “It’s one of those, ‘Is that your heart? Let me pull on it!’ kind of movies,” he chuckles. “I play a quarterback, the best quarterback in the NFL. He’s very brash, not brash to the point of being unlikeable, and his life gets flipped, turned upside down, when he finds out he has a daughter.”

Johnson had been talking with Disney for some time, looking for the right project.

“I had passed on The Pacifier,” – the Vin Diesel movie about a reluctant child-carer. “I was happy for its success but it just wasn’t for me. I was waiting for the right opportunity.”

While he files Doom under “popcorn”, Johnson is keen to stress it was a heavy film to make, shot largely on the forbidding and anonymous sound stages in the Barrandov Studios in Prague.

“It was the most physically demanding role I’ve done, just being away from home, never seeing the sun, shooting on a sound stage, waking up at five and getting out of the sound stage at seven at night,” he explains.

“And every day it’s a question of who’s chasing who, somebody’s dying and there’s a head being ripped off, and stuff like that. So physically it was pretty demanding. Did I have fun? I had fun always reminding myself that it was worth making and fun, period.”

Has he ever played the original game of Doom?

“I have, of course,” he says, without a second’s hesitation. “I was a big fan of the game. Before we shot the movie, I spent a lot of time with the guys down in Texas, at Id Software, the creators of Doom. There’s a wide interpretation though, with the movie and with the character. I just wanted to make sure that I understood the geography, where we were, and to make sure that the script and their thoughts always matched together.”

Johnson and his fellow actors were even serious enough about the film to endure a major boot camp session of military training and fitness before the cameras rolled.

“Even though I consider this a summer popcorn movie, we still wanted to lend a sense of authenticity to our roles, and if we were going to be soldiers it was important to talk like soldiers, act like soldiers, use the weapons like soldiers, and react to certain things like soldiers – even though we were dealing with monsters in space and in the future.”

credit: icwales

Right now, The Rock is on a roll, and since Doom he has completed two movies that most definitely demonstrate his versatility and lack of stereotyping. One is Gridiron Game, an inspirational fact-based drama in which he plays a juvenile detention centre counsellor who forms a football team of young criminals.

The other is Southland Tales, directed by Donnie Darko whizzkid Richard Kelly, and it’s a movie which defies description; a comedy-musical-sci-fi-thriller set in a Los Angeles heatwave of the future.

Doom opens in cinemas on Friday.