The idea of the “movie star” is becoming a thing of the past in the age of franchises. The new stars of the silver screen are intellectual properties like superheroes and YA romances and galaxies far, far away. Playing Tony Stark gave Robert Downey, Jr. a career comeback and then went on to make him a bigger star than ever before, allowing him to command a salary of $50 million a role, but his first movie after leaving the MCU was a box office bomb.
Having said that, a few beloved actors have managed to slip through the cracks. A-listers like Kevin Hart and Melissa McCarthy regularly attract blockbuster crowds to original movies based on their involvement alone. But one of the only actors whose non-franchise-associated movies manage to compete with Avengers and Force users at the box office is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
RELATED: Study Finds Dwayne Johnson Plays A Third Of All API Lead Film Roles
The former WWE star successfully reinvented himself as Hollywood’s go-to leading man by joining the Fast & Furious franchise in the exact right movie (2011’s Fast Five). In the years since, Johnson and his team of agents and publicists have carefully constructed an image for the actor as a likable heroic everyman protagonist who’s nice to everybody he meets and always saves the day. In Rampage, he’s an animal lover. In The Fate of the Furious, he coaches his daughter’s soccer team. In Central Intelligence, his character occasionally turns the movie into an anti-bullying PSA.
Unlike most wrestlers-turned-movie-stars, The Rock has actually demonstrated some real acting chops. He may not be as great as Dave Bautista, whose surprising capacity for nuance has caught the attention of Denis Villeneuve, but he’s a far cry from Hulk Hogan, Jesse Ventura, and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. Johnson always fully commits himself to a character – it’s just usually the same resolutely good-natured character he played in all his other movies.
When John Wayne and Henry Fonda were established stars known for playing clear-cut western heroes, they subverted their audiences’ expectations by radically playing against type as an unlikable character: Wayne as a grizzled alcoholic antihero in True Grit and Fonda as a cold-blooded killer in Once Upon a Time in the West. Now that The Rock’s movie star brand has been established and the aforementioned agents and publicists (and Johnson himself) are reaping the rewards, the next step is to go beyond that persona and explore the actor’s darker side.
With roles like Ethan Edwards and Sheriff John T. Chance, John Wayne rounded out a screen persona as an unwavering hero who never backs down from a fight, always tries to do the right thing, and makes sure justice is served. He even had his own team of in-house screenwriters to tailor scripts specifically to his screen persona. In 1969, Wayne challenged himself with the role of U.S. Marshal “Rooster” Cogburn in Henry Hathaway’s True Grit, adapted from Charles Portis’ novel of the same name.
Wayne signed on after reading Marguerite Roberts’ script and deeming it to be the best he’d ever read, but according to Scott Eyman’s John Wayne: The Life and Legend, he was nervous about playing Cogburn, because it forced him out of his comfort zone. Cogburn isn’t the kind of steadfast heroic lawman Wayne was used to playing. He’s a bitter, hard-drinking cynic who’s extremely reluctant to help Mattie Ross track down her father’s killer. Subverting his screen persona with a rough-around-the-edges antihero resulted in one of Wayne’s finest performances.
Henry Fonda similarly built up a likable movie star image with films like My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache (in which he co-starred with Wayne), and The Grapes of Wrath, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. In Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, Fonda played wildly against type as Frank, a sadistic hitman who’s sent to intimidate a land baron and instead kills him and his three young children in cold blood.
Leone was desperate to work with Fonda as he was one of his childhood heroes, and he used the opportunity to play against type to attract Fonda to the project: “Picture this: the camera shows a gunman from the waist down pulling his gun and shooting a running child. The camera tilts up to the gunman’s face and... it’s Henry Fonda.” The success of Once Upon a Time in the West prompted Fonda to continue to explore darker roles, and the back end of his career was marked by these challenging, amoral characters.
Johnson doesn’t have to go too far down that rabbit hole, but he should star in at least one movie that subverts his own established brand with a morally gray antihero or an all-out reprehensible villain. He’s playing a supervillain in Black Adam, but as a big-budget comic book blockbuster, that movie won’t have the freedom to dig into the actor’s untapped dark side like True Grit did for John Wayne. With all that money on the table and the notoriously finnicky Warner Bros. overseeing the production, Black Adam will inevitably play it safe as a crowd-pleasing superhero epic (and hopefully an enjoyable one).
The best way for The Rock to really blow audiences’ minds now that his brand is well-established would be to play a truly terrible human being, and not just a soft-edged jerk who throws around playful insults and ultimately has a heart of gold; a character like Humphrey Bogart’s dangerously paranoid Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, who Bogart himself described as “the worst s*** you ever saw.” Playing an antihero in a Leone-type revisionist thriller would probably be Johnson’s best shot at an Oscar nomination.