The opening months of 2024 have posed a question: How many different people can the Rock be at once? There he goes, taking the stage at the Oscars, grinning and gleaming on The Tonight Show: Movie-Star Rock. Here he is, joining the board of the WWE’s corporate owner, appearing on CNBC: Mogul Rock. (That one wears glasses!) Here he comes, this weekend, making his much-hyped return to Wrestlemania. He’ll climb back into the ring, stomping and slapping: Well, that’s just the Rock. He’s not a person but a parade, and it works, all of it at once, because Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson never blinks.
At the same time, he remains Pitchman Rock, introducing a line of men’s skin-care products. The new brand, called Papatui, joins the Rock’s portfolio alongside Teremana tequila and Zoa, an energy drink.
Papatui’s branding is restrained and sensitive, with the tagline “Take Better Care.” On the website’s front page, Dwayne Johnson wears a plain Henley in a luxe, light-filled bathroom. He smiles warmly while applying various products.
This soft, inviting marketing material was presumably produced months ago. We can imagine the Papatui team gritting their teeth as, weeks before their launch, the Rock’s WWE role took a dark turn.
Late March; Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s Instagram profile. He surprises Target shoppers, glad-handing on behalf of rejuvenating facial toner. A few posts up, he grips a wrestling opponent’s bloody face and holds it up for the camera to see.
The Papatui team need not have worried. It works because the Rock never blinks.
He is not the first performer to conjure different personas in different venues; it’s just that, traditionally, the venues stayed different. But through the past decade, Dwayne Johnson and Instagram both grew huge. Everything is there in his feed, every tone and register, the Rock gleefully profane and the Rock (literally) squeaky clean. Context collapse brings it all swirling together.
And maybe that’s the key. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s career, the whole logic of him as a global superstar, is context collapse, not only in the sense of the walls coming down, but also of a star imploding. The laws of physics bent to breaking. You can do anything, as long as you don’t blink.
The Rock’s return to WWE matches, starting in January after a decade away from wrestling in earnest, wasn’t universally well received. His presence disrupted a long-anticipated storyline; fans smelled entitlement. For a moment—just a moment—it seemed that this might be a misfire, a bookend to the hype and disappointment of his superhero outing as Black Adam.
But the strange and protean craft of pro-wrestling storytelling takes surprises in stride. Like sailors steering into the wind, the Rock and his writers retuned the role: Instead of the returning champion, he would be the corporate overlord, a dark and domineering Final Boss.
“Settle down, you Crackhead Karens,” he shouted into an arena last month. “You Methhead Marys!” Later, he cackled: “They loved it; they hated it; they cheered; they booed.”
Before he shaped and directed the attention of hundreds of millions of followers on Instagram, he shaped and directed the energy of fans like these. The social-media platforms are creaking, something feels askew, and I wonder if Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson doesn’t feel it, a tingle in his extended nervous system, a premonition. I wonder if he realized it was time to dust off a different set of skills.
Seeing him so responsive, so fluid, makes a Rock watcher realize how much he gives up in the world of Hollywood, where roles, once set, are fixed. Where a dud, once produced, must be defended. The Rock does better when he can listen and adjust. (Sounds a lot like politics.)
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has not only grown comfortable with context collapse; he’s learned to wield it to his benefit, weaponizing the overlap between domains and audiences. On Instagram, he doesn’t only promote new projects; he frames them in very specific and strategic ways—a new role becomes the realignment of an entire movie franchise. You get the feeling that many of these pronouncements come as a surprise to his collaborators. Oh well, the Rock just said it to 100 million people. What are you gonna do?
If there’s one thing that unites all the versions of the Rock, it’s that they—he—will always spin things his way, always with a smile and a hard light in his eyes. It matters that his personal megaphone has the reach of any newspaper, any TV network. It matters more that he’s had so much practice using it.
How is it possible to be so many people at once? To insist, in each domain, on your sincerity—even when the personas are basically contradictory, nearly incompatible? A normal human-size sense of shame, and a stubborn attachment to a unitary personality, keeps most of us from even attempting the trick. Public figures all do it, to some degree—but none so variously, or so successfully, as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
He just never blinks!
On the internet—on this very website, in fact—everything is mixed up, the important alongside the absurd, the tragic alongside the trivial. Like many people, I often find this disorienting, even distressing. But the walls are down, and they won’t go up again.
Here is a figure who doesn’t stop one thing to start another, who doesn’t try to explain or integrate his wildly different personas and projects but simply presents them all in a tumble. Maybe there’s a model there, even for those of us operating far below the Rock’s altitude. Just collapse, already. Steer into the wind.
