This is the GQ Video Cover Story, a feature that delivers all the access and depth of a classic GQ print profile—but does it via long-form digital video. Watch the Cover Story, reported by Zach Baron and directed by Cole Evelev and Noel Howard, in its entirety above, and read the accompanying profile from our 2024 Men of the Year issue below.
It’s not that Dwayne Johnson is tall, though he is—about six feet four inches and broad, with an adamantine bald head and sculptural shoulders. It’s not that he is part Samoan, part Black, though he is that too. It’s not even that Johnson is what Hollywood likes to euphemistically call the most successful movie star alive, meaning, most years, the highest paid. It’s that these things—the shape of the man, his parents, his professional ascendance—have combined in a singular way to make him recognizable at more or less any distance. Because of this, Johnson struggles, in the most prosaic sense, to be alone.
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He can count the number of places available to him for solitude on three mighty fingers, and does. He can go sit inside his truck, which he likes to drive to set no matter what city he is in, in part because his silhouette is less noticeable behind the wheel of a car. He can go to his gym. Or he can come here, to the generous property he owns in rural Virginia, with a three-acre pond and a horse barn and green hills and a Victorian-style house of slightly exaggerated, Dwayne Johnson–esque proportions.
Anywhere else, Johnson says, and he’s probably surrounded by people—other actors, directors, executives, businesspeople, employees, fans, journalists, children, wife (Lauren Hashian) and ex-wife (Dany Garcia, who is still Johnson’s business partner). “I feel like the moment I walk out the door,” he says, “that’s when the whirlwind starts.” He is mostly okay with this. When I ask Johnson, who used to regularly perform live in sold-out arenas as a professional wrestler known as The Rock—Johnson’s first real career, and the thing that first made him famous—whether he is comfortable around other people, he seems genuinely confused about the question. “Oh yeah,” Johnson says. “For sure. Like…am I an asshole?”
In my experience: no. Johnson is in fact famous for remembering your name and your kid’s name and your kid’s grandparents’ names, a.k.a. the names of your parents, whom he wishes well in their next life chapter of retirement, etc. He observes closely, asks a lot of questions. His art is the art of being himself. There is only one guy remotely like him, and that guy would love to get to know you, and have you know him in turn.
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