The Rock keeps it real

Producer Marc Abraham is accustomed to A-list attitude. After all, he’s made movies with Kevin Costner and Harrison Ford. So when Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson approached Abraham on the very first day of filming “The Rundown,” the producer was ready for the usual laundry list of diva demands.

“I want you to know that if there’s anything you ever want to tell me about my acting ... “ Johnson began, as Abraham waited for the punch line, “ ... be sure to let me know.”

Abraham scanned the film’s crew, certain one of them had orchestrated a joke. “I thought someone put the Rock up to it,” the producer says. But Johnson wasn’t kidding. The former professional wrestler wants to grow as an actor. And he’s finally getting his chance.

Opening Sept. 26, “The Rundown” tells the story of a reluctant bounty hunter named Beck (Johnson) sent to the Amazonian jungles to bring home his boss’ wild son, Travis (Seann William Scott). Once in Brazil, Beck and Travis clash not only with each other but also battle the ruthless gold mining mogul (Christopher Walken) who has enslaved the local workers.

The hulking Johnson certainly has his share of smack-down brawls in the film, and naturally gets to pull his shirt off. Yet the movie still represents a big leap for one of Hollywood’s fastest-rising action heroes. Like some musclemen turned superstars before him, Johnson wants to become much more than an imposing physical spectacle. He wants to be a leading man. And he knows that transition is perilous.

For every Arnold Schwarzenegger who takes off, there are three popular brutes who crash and burn: What was the last movie you saw starring Hulk Hogan, Rowdy Roddy Piper or Brian Bosworth? The 6-foot-5 Johnson is also not helped by Hollywood’s new definition of what an action star should look like: Vin Diesel (“XXX”) is one of the very few actors following in the he-man footsteps laid by Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. The current rage in casting action films tips toward wisps like Tobey Maguire and Orlando Bloom, whom Johnson could bench press in his sleep.

Johnson already has come far.

In his first film, “The Mummy Returns,” Johnson barely spoke, and it wasn’t in English. In “The Scorpion King,” his dialogue was as insubstantial -- “I’ve come for the woman ... and your head!” -- as his loincloth. With “The Rundown,” Johnson finally speaks in complete sentences, and his character Beck even wears a suit. What’s more, Johnson gets to capitalize on his own self-deprecating persona, as the film matches every action scene with an equal dose of comedy.

“I haven’t been in the industry very long. But I still want to be really good,” Johnson says. “I’m not delusional by any means. Dustin Hoffman I am not.”

Universal takes a chance

Movie studios used to create new stars the way the Dodgers would groom minor leaguers, patiently guiding raw talent to the top of the professional ranks. But just as free agency changed baseball forever, the collapse of long-term studio contracts in the 1950s curtailed one studio’s ability to single-handedly build a movie career. These days, as soon as one studio breaks an actor, every other studio joins the chase.

Within three years after Fox released Colin Farrell’s “Tigerland,” the Irish flavor-of-the-month was in movies for Warner Bros., MGM, Fox and DreamWorks, Disney, Fox, Disney and DreamWorks, and Sony.

Universal was the first to take a flier and cast Johnson in a film. Before that cameo in “The Mummy Returns” was first seen by paying moviegoers, Universal paid him $5.5 million to star in its spinoff, “The Scorpion King.” Both films were solid hits. Universal then wrote Johnson a $12.5-million check to star in “The Rundown,” and the studio is developing no fewer than three movies for Johnson to make as soon as he finishes MGM’s “Walking Tall” remake. (Universal tried to find a movie for Johnson before he made “Walking Tall,” for which he’s earning $15 million, but didn’t have anything ready in time.)

Universal’s idea is simple, albeit unusual in an era where stars relocate so frequently. In shaping projects specifically for Johnson, the studio hopes to keep the budding star in the fold for as long as possible.

“Loyalty is very important to me. And with ‘The Mummy Returns,’ Universal took a chance,” Johnson says. “And, especially on ‘The Scorpion King,’ a really big chance. And I will never forget that.”

The benefits are reciprocal. Both Johnson and the studio can make a lot of money, and Universal can work to ensure a sequence of roles that theoretically keeps Johnson out of a career-ending clunker like Steven Seagal’s “Half Past Dead.”

“We don’t want to spoof him too fast or switch out of the action genre too quickly,” says Stacey Snider, Universal’s chairman. “We were able to articulate a strategy for him from the very beginning.”

That strategy requires extreme care.

“The spin cycle is much, much faster today,” says Kevin Misher, one of “The Rundown’s” producers and Universal’s former production chief. “When Arnold Schwarzenegger was created, he had a number of movies to make the progression before people would say, ‘It’s not working.’ Now, no one has any patience. If ‘Scorpion King’ didn’t work, people would say of the Rock, ‘Well, it’s not happening.’ ”

Cherishing his rough start

IT’S mid-May, a few weeks after filming has wrapped on “The Rundown,” and the 31-year-old Johnson has just left Gold’s Gym in Venice. His muscles are ripped, and yet even in a quiet restaurant he speaks so gently you can barely make out a word he’s saying. While other stars of his magnitude would arrive in Town Cars, Johnson drives himself -- and even gets a parking ticket.

“I am reminded of how easy it is to become an ass,” says Johnson, who would rather spend time with his wife, Dany, who runs a hedge fund, and 2-year-old daughter, Simone, than attend Hollywood premieres. “But I also think the people who are asses now were asses before they became famous.”

The grandson of wrestler Peter Maivia and son of wrestler Rocky Johnson, the Rock lived an itinerant life as a child. He attended the University of Miami on a football scholarship with two objectives: graduate and play professional ball.

He earned his diploma in criminology in 1994, but his career as a defensive tackle took him not to the NFL but the Canadian Football League, where no riches awaited him. He was broke and sharing an unfurnished two-bedroom Calgary house with four other players.

“None of us had any money, because we were all on the practice squad,” Johnson says. “A buddy of mine said you should go to hotels, because they are always throwing away mattresses. So we borrowed a truck, and we went to the local Calgary sex motel that went by hourly rates. We went into the lobby, and the manager said, ‘You’re in luck. We just threw our old mattresses away, and they are right out back.’ ”

His fortunes were no better on the football field. “I played just one game,” he says. “And I stunk up the field.”

Rather than leaving him bitter, those early struggles sparked ambition.

“I remember somebody telling me, ‘Once you have ever been really, truly hungry, you will never, ever be full.’ When I heard that, I said, ‘That is so true.’ What I take away from [those experiences] is never, ever giving up. And being smart enough to recognize -- OK, this road is now closed off,” Johnson says, slamming his fist into his palm. “I never thought that would mean making millions and becoming an actor. I just thought, I want to make more than $200 a week.”

He returned to Miami with just $7 in his pocket, and decided to join the family business. Johnson first played a good guy in the ring, but proved far more popular as a wrestling villain. In 1996, he debuted in the World Wrestling Federation, and before long the Rock was one of the WWF’s biggest stars.

“I didn’t so much watch the wrestling as watch the speeches he made before and after the fights,” says “The Rundown’s” director, Pete Berg, who looked at old WWF tapes before making the film. “And they are all essentially Shakespearean soliloquies -- all of these different emotions, one after another, in a one-man show. He’s probably got more stage experience than Meryl Streep.”

Other acting gigs, in other words, were not a big stretch. He debuted as a TV actor in “That ‘70s Show” in 1999 and a year later guest-hosted “Saturday Night Live.” He was on his way.

Tone it down

THE hundreds of young moviegoers invited to the Universal CityWalk Cineplex this July evening are ready to rumble. They know very little about “The Rundown” except that it stars the Rock. And that’s about all they need to know.

The audience reflects every ethnicity; Johnson’s father is black and his mother Samoan, giving him broad appeal. The moviegoers cheer Johnson as soon as he comes on screen, and seem particularly entertained by scenes between “American Wedding’s” Scott and him. In life just as in the wrestling ring, Johnson possesses sharp comic timing, and “The Rundown” celebrates that humor whenever possible.

All of Universal’s senior executives watch from the theater’s back row, and they’re giddy when the movie ends. The executives initially had planned to organize focus groups after the screening to discuss how the film might be improved. But the showing goes so well, they scrap them.

If Johnson had to carry “The Scorpion King” with his tremendous biceps, he has a taller order with “The Rundown.” He has to carry this movie with his acting (he even lost 25 pounds for the part, so he would look less cartoonishly buff).

To try to learn as much as possible about film acting, he spent time watching Walken perform, even when Johnson wasn’t in scenes opposite “Deer Hunter’s” Oscar winner. Johnson studied with an acting coach, as he did on “The Scorpion King,” and rather than keep the tutor hidden away in his dressing room, he introduced him to everybody on the set. He invited criticism -- from Abraham, Berg, Misher or anybody else. And he kept working at breaking old habits.

In wrestling, Johnson says, “I was very over-the-top with my facial expressions. We play 360 degrees, all the way back to the people in the cheap seats. So everything is very big and animated.”

On the set of “The Rundown,” even when he was fending off bullwhip-wielding goons, Johnson’s mantra was to make everything smaller, less broad. “Keep it real,” he repeated to himself. “Keep it real.”

Fight scene and the flu

THE Rock doesn’t look so hot. As much as he wants to grow as a performer, he’s not yet being offered serious dramas -- not that he wants them anyway. When he makes a movie, he expects both to get beat up and dish it out. “Walking Tall,” a story of one principled man’s taking the law into his own hands, is no exception.

He has spent this August morning at an abandoned Vancouver lumber mill being tossed out of a two-story window in the film’s final fight scene. Just before he hits the ground, a wire harness abruptly snags him, but it’s a difficult feat for a healthy stuntman, and Johnson is neither a stuntman nor healthy.

A doctor ducks into Johnson’s dressing room between takes, prescribes an antibiotic, and Johnson pours all sorts of energy powders and fruit juices into a blender to help wash it down.

“How you feeling?” the film’s director, Kevin Bray, asks as soon as Johnson returns to the set. Johnson now must slide 10 feet down a sawdust chute, land in a pile of wood chips, and fight the film’s villain, played by Neal McDonough. “I’m fine,” Johnson says, lying, but game as always.

The scene starts again and McDonough repeatedly slams Johnson into the wall, hardly the quickest way to get better.

Johnson was probably no more than one chromosome away from making it in professional football: “I was good but I was not great,” he says. “My weakness was not having natural football instincts.”

Which brings up the question: Does he have natural acting instincts? “I don’t know,” he says candidly. “I can only go on what my peers and the studios and directors say.” Which is: Yeah, you do.