Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is opening up about the complicated relationship he had with his late father, Rocky Johnson, and the painful last time they spoke.
According to Fox News, the 53-year-old actor revealed to The New York Times Magazine that their final conversation turned into a fight over Rocky’s memoir. Johnson said his father’s book included passages that gave Rocky credit for his son’s success — even a foreword supposedly written by Johnson himself.
“It hurts,” Johnson said. “It just completely crossed the line. It goes back to the attention, the narcissism.”
Rocky Johnson, a former professional wrestler, had just published Soulman: The Rocky Johnson Story at the time. The blowup in 2019 was the most intense fight the two had since 25 years earlier, when Johnson first told his father he wanted to follow in his wrestling footsteps.
“What do you think you possibly have to offer?” Rocky asked him then.
Their relationship had been strained long before. Johnson said his father was often absent during his childhood, frequently on the road, while his parents’ marriage was so volatile they sometimes lived apart. He admitted those separations were “kind of a relief from the fighting.”
Still, one of Johnson’s most painful memories came from his father. At age 15, he and his mother were evicted from their Hawaii apartment. His mom asked Rocky if Dwayne could stay with him in Tennessee until she settled things.
“It hurt my heart,” Johnson recalled of watching his mother react to the eviction notice. His father reassured her, saying, “No problem, I’ve got an apartment.”
But when Johnson arrived in Nashville, his father wasn’t there. Instead, a man named Bob drove him to a motel, where another man named Bruno — now a longtime friend of Johnson — told him he’d be living. Johnson quickly realized his dad was with another woman.
“My heart hurts when I think about that,” Johnson said. “The pain that my mom was driving with: Like ‘What is my life now? That whole time?’”
When his mom arrived after driving from San Francisco, she too discovered the truth.
“That was it. Within five minutes it all just … It wasn’t even an explosion. It was just a — collapse,” Johnson said.
The moment changed him. He described becoming “the main man” in his mother’s life, even pulling her back from tragedy when she attempted to walk into freeway traffic.
“The look on her face,” he said, “still haunts him. She was gone.”
As for his father’s memoir, Johnson called it “fiction.”
“Growing up with my dad, I know the truth to all these stories, and they’re not in this book. If the truth is blue, the story is red,” he explained. Johnson eventually had the book pulled from stores.
Johnson learned of his father’s death in 2020 on his way to film Red Notice. Though he considered going home, he remembered his father’s mantra: the “show must go on.”
At Rocky’s funeral, Johnson came to see how many wrestlers, including Hulk Hogan and Triple H, viewed his father as a great friend.
“Wildly enough, my old man was just this amazing friend,” Johnson said. “Complicated husband. Complicated dad. But an awesome friend to everyone else.”
Asked if his father was ever his friend, Johnson replied, “He wasn’t my friend either. I wish. I think that my mom was my friend.”
Today, Johnson has three daughters of his own: Simone, 24; Jasmine, 9; and Tiana, 7.
