Yahoo Finance Dwayne Johnson Opens Up About the Truth Behind 'Young Rock'
Though the new NBC sitcom Young Rock is just getting started, it's already taking viewers for quite the wild ride.
The series throws us right into the middle of a 2032 presidential race after Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has secured one party's nomination. While trying to connect with voters on the campaign trail, Dwayne, who appears as himself in the series, tells political reporters all kinds of stories from his childhood, ranging from how he looked up to his wrestler father, Rocky (Joseph Lee Anderson), to aspiring to play in the NFL during his college years. All of these life memories have viewers wondering ...
Is Young Rock based on a true story?
For the most part, yes. The NBC sitcom was created to tell the real-life story of Dwayne and how he ended up becoming not only a wrestling icon but a successful movie star, husband, and father. While working on the show, Dwayne told The New York Times that he and show creators Nahnatchka Khan and Jeff Chiang would discuss his experiences at length in order to craft the episode scripts.
"It required a lot of hours of sitting down with Nahnatchka, just talking and sharing stories and then walking away, going back home, writing things down, meeting back again, going over more stories," Dwayne said, adding that he poured himself "a lot of tequilas" to help him recall his memories.
Given how surreal some of the stories seem, it's tempting to think that some of the events were dramatized. But as Dwayne told USA Today, the stories, even the really "unbelievable" ones, — Dwayne's arrests, buying a car with some "unexpected occupants" in it, getting beaten out of his position by the Warren Sapp — are all pretty much true ... give and take a few edits here and there.
"The fun thing about Young Rock is everything that people see in this first episode and throughout the season, everything happened,” Dwayne said. "Now, what we do is, maybe it happened in a different year, maybe it happened in a different city."
What else is true? The fact that Dwayne is actually open to running for president someday, an idea he once called "a real possibility" back in 2017.
"I would consider a presidential run in the future if that's what the people wanted," he told USA Today. "Truly I mean that, and I'm not flippant in any way with my answer. That would be up to the people ... So I would wait, and I would listen. I would have my finger on the pulse, my ear to the ground."
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