At the age of 47 (he was born May 2, 1972), Dwayne Douglas Johnson is at the peak of his screen career, as star and producer.
Known by his ring name The Rock, Johnson has been consistently ranked among the world’s highest paid actors, making Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” list in both 2016 and in 2019.
Johnson was a professional wrestler in the WWE for eight years prior to pursuing an acting career. His films have since earned over $3.4 billion in North America, making him one of the highest-grossing actors of all-time.
Johnson was a college football player for the University of Miami, winning a national championship in 1991. He initially aspired for a professional career in football and entered the 1995 NFL Draft, but went undrafted. Johnson then signed with the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League (CFL) but was cut from the team in the middle of his first season there. Shortly after, he began training as a professional wrestler.
He rose to prominence after developing a charismatic persona of a boastful trash-talking wrestler named The Rock. He subsequently won his first WWF Championship in 1998 and helped usher the WWF into the “Attitude Era”, a boom period in the company’s business.
In 2004, at the age of 32, he left the WWE to pursue an acting career and went on a seven-year hiatus before returning in 2011 as a part-time performer until 2013.
Johnson had his first screen role in The Mummy Returns (2001) and played his first lead role in the spin-off The Scorpion King (2002).
He went on to star in numerous other films, including The Rundown (2003), The Other Guys (2010), Moana (2016), and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017).
Johnson’s most successful box office role has been a recurring role as Luke Hobbs in The Fast and the Furious movies. He first appeared as the character in Fast Five (2011) and helped catapult the series into one of the top-grossing franchises in history.
The popularity of the character portrayed by Johnson then resulted in The Fast and the Furious spin-off movie Hobbs & Shaw (2019).
Johnson has also attained success as an author: In 2000, he released an autobiography titled The Rock Says… which debuted at number 1 on The New York Times Best Seller list.
In 2012, he founded his company, Seven Bucks Productions, which has since produced several films.
