That is the GQ Video Cowl Story, a function that delivers all of the entry and depth of a traditional GQ print profile—however does it by way of long-form digital video. Watch the Cowl Story, reported by Zach Baron and directed by Cole Evelev and Noel Howard, in its entirety above, and browse the accompanying profile from our 2024 Males of the 12 months situation under.
It’s not that Dwayne Johnson is tall, although he’s—about six ft 4 inches and broad, with an adamantine bald head and sculptural shoulders. It’s not that he’s half Samoan, half Black, although he’s that too. It’s not even that Johnson is what Hollywood likes to euphemistically name essentially the most profitable film star alive, that means, most years, the very best paid. It’s that this stuff—the form of the person, his mother and father, his skilled ascendance—have mixed in a singular option to make him recognizable at roughly any distance. Due to this, Johnson struggles, in essentially the most prosaic sense, to be alone.
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He can rely the variety of locations accessible to him for solitude on three mighty fingers, and does. He can go sit inside his truck, which he likes to drive to set it doesn’t matter what metropolis he’s in, partially as a result of his silhouette is much less noticeable behind the wheel of a automobile. He can go to his health club. Or he can come right here, to the beneficiant property he owns in rural Virginia, with a three-acre pond and a horse barn and inexperienced hills and a Victorian-style home of barely exaggerated, Dwayne Johnson–esque proportions.
Anyplace else, Johnson says, and he’s in all probability surrounded by folks—different actors, administrators, executives, businesspeople, workers, followers, journalists, youngsters, spouse (Lauren Hashian) and ex-wife (Dany Garcia, who continues to be Johnson’s enterprise accomplice). “I really feel just like the second I stroll out the door,” he says, “that’s when the whirlwind begins.” He’s principally okay with this. Once I ask Johnson, who used to repeatedly carry out stay in sold-out arenas as knowledgeable wrestler generally known as The Rock—Johnson’s first actual profession, and the factor that first made him well-known—whether or not he’s snug round different folks, he appears genuinely confused concerning the query. “Oh yeah,” Johnson says. “For certain. Like…am I an asshole?”
In my expertise: no. Johnson is in actual fact well-known for remembering your identify and your child’s identify and your child’s grandparents’ names, a.ok.a. the names of your mother and father, whom he needs effectively of their subsequent life chapter of retirement, and so on. He observes intently, asks a whole lot of questions. His artwork is the artwork of being himself. There is just one man remotely like him, and that man would like to get to know you, and have you already know him in flip.
