It may seem like Dwayne Johnson is rarely absent from our screens for any notable length of time, but he recently revealed that he’s currently unemployed.
Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s struggling to find work, just that for the first time in quite a while he’s stopped jumping from one major project to another. He talked about his current workload (or lack thereof) during an interview for a profile in the Wall Street Journal, at a point when he’d wrapped on Disney adventure movie Jungle Cruise, but prior to launching into his next production, most likely to be either Netflix crime thriller Red Notice or DC origin movie Black Adam. He revealed that he’s used his temporarily copious free time to be with his family, enjoying having the breathing space to spend his days with them.
“I’m unemployed, man!” Johnson told WSJ reporter Josh Eells. “It’s honestly been the best,” he says. “It’s so nice to have this downtime with the family, just taking a breather.”
Although many professional wrestlers often attempt the jump to mainstream acting, Johnson is the most successful since the ubiquity of Hulk Hogan in the ‘90s, his popularity being more a result of his boundless reserves of charisma than his imposing stature that allows him to convince as a natural action star.
Even since his earliest acting roles in the likes of an episode of Star Trek: Voyager as an alien warrior or his few minutes of screen time as the Scorpion King in The Mummy Returns, he’s seemed to never be short of work, having appeared in at least one significant release every year this century, and frequently more than that. In this year alone, he’s been seen in Fast & Furious spinoff Hobbs & Shaw, WWE biopic Fighting With My Family, and the imminently released gaming sequel Jumanji: The Next Level, while on TV has hosted sports game show The Titan Games and starred in the comedy drama Ballers.
He may not have been working for several months, but he certainly did enough prior to his down time to leave us all benefiting from the fruits of his labor without noticing his professional absence, and it will doubtless be long before Dwayne Johnson is back into things and giving us more to be entertained by.
