Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has opened up about the profound personal impact of his new film, The Smashing Machine, stating that the movie “completely changed my life.” The A24 biopic, in which Johnson plays former MMA fighter Mark Kerr, was a passion project for the star but has struggled at the box office since its release last month.
Appearing on “The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter” podcast, The Rock explained that the film represented a turning point in his acting career, as it was the first time he chose a role to “challenge” himself rather than focusing on commercial success.
“Smashing Machine also represents a turning point in my career that I’ve wanted for a long time. For the first time in my career — 20 plus years since The Scorpion King came out. I made a film to challenge myself and to really rip myself open and to go elsewhere and disappear and transform. And not one time did I think about box office.”
He went on to say that the disappointing box office numbers didn’t bother him because the film allowed him to explore his own childhood trauma for the first time.
“Even though we didn’t do well [at the box office]… it was okay because it just represented the thing I did for me. Maybe it was because I was an only child, but all the stuff that I had experienced as a kid and as a teenager — eviction, my mom tried to take her life two months after we got evicted and I pulled her out of the middle of the highway, a whole bunch of stuff happened. I had rejected exploring any of that on film. For years I would do these other films that were big and fun, Jumanji and Moana, with a happy ending, and I love that still. But what this represented was, ‘Oh wait, I can do the thing I love, which is to tell stories, but I could also take all this stuff and have a place to put it.’”