Dwayne Johnson has spent the last decade carefully curating his on and offscreen persona, which has worked a treat given that he’s comfortably one of the biggest and most popular stars on the planet, while he’d definitely the highest-paid.
One of the downsides is that it’s seen the hulking actor and producer tackle variations of the same archetypal role over and over again. When you see Johnson’s name attached to a project, there’s a distinct chance he’ll be a current or former military or law enforcement type, with a noble disposition and penchant for a snappy one-liner.
The 49 year-old has a lot more range than he’s willing to display, with Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain being one of the more prominent examples. Johnson is on scene-stealing and riotous form as a drug-addled ex-con who can’t keep his nose clean either figuratively or literally, but director Michael Bay revealed to CinemaBlend that he had to convince the ex-WWE star to stick with the black comedy after he initially tried to back out.
“He literally quit the week before. And he goes, ‘I can’t do this.’ And I’m like, ‘Dwayne, you are my secret weapon on this movie.’ And I wrote him this long letter of all the actors I worked with who said they were scared to do something and how it turned out. And he goes, ‘Ok. Ok. Alright.’ He was brilliant in that movie, and it really is an amazing performance.”
Bay wasn’t lying, because Johnson really was the secret weapon of Pain & Gain, an otherwise-middling crime thriller. It’s comfortably one of his best performances, not to mention one we’d love to see from him a whole lot more often.
