What's the secret to The Rock's success?

Dwayne Johnson is big. Really big. The WWE wrestler-turned-Hollywood star is 6ft 4in, a solid 250lb-worth of hunk – a muscular alpha monument of a guy, much like the “Brahma bull” logo which he has tattooed on to one of his Crossrail-tunnel-proportioned arms. Yet his shaven head, which he has sported for some years now, also gives him a kind of Buddha-like calm to go with the bulk, an easy geniality that makes him castable in family adventures and action comedies. Aged 45, he is up at 5am every day to work out for at least a couple of hours, a regime he inherited from his dad, Rocky Johnson, himself a professional wrestler, from whom Johnson adapted his wrestling name – The Rock. Johnson is of impeccable wrestling lineage. His Samoan grandfather, Peter Maivia, was a legend among wrestling fans. And Johnson is big in another way. He is now simply the world’s biggest movie star. In 2015, his films reportedly made $1.488bn at the box office . In an industry which desperately needs tentpole stars and above-the-title players, people whose simple presence can “open” a movie, Johnson is a prince. As he today opens his new, outrageously silly extravaganza, Rampage, Johnson is entering his celebrity prime, now confident enough to discuss his problems with depression, his tough upbringing and the agony of witnessing his mother’s attempt at taking her own life after they were evicted from their apartment when he was a teenager. But how did this happen? What exactly has he done? Has he ever made any good films? It is difficult to pin down quite what roles Johnson has made his own. Arnie had The Terminator, Sylvester had Rambo and Rocky, Bruce had Die Hard and, these days, Tom has Mission: Impossible. But Dwayne isn’t like that, and he’s not a classic action star, either. He has spread his career and brand identity into a wider portfolio of genres and franchise properties, and the return on these has collectively added up to a colossal amount of celebrity clout. Like Arnie with Conan the Barbarian, Johnson began by parleying his muscles into a “mythic” role. He was The Scorpion King in 2002, a role spun off from his small part in The Mummy Returns the year before. Johnson made action movies such as The Rundown in 2003 and the not-much-liked Doom in 2005, based on a video game. He had a brief and very surreal flirtation with auteur-arthouse, making his debut at the Cannes film festival in Richard Kelly’s cult movie Southland Tales in 2007, alongside Seann William Scott. But his career takeoff really came at the end of the decade, when he made his debut in the fifth movie in the petrolhead Fast and Furious franchise, playing Luke Hobbs, the Government agent dedicated to taking on Vin Diesel’s daredevil criminal Dominic “Dom” Toretto. Johnson siphoned off the huge popularity of these movies into his own career petrol tank. But he also played the lead in Disney’s Race To Witch Mountain, the action-adventure remake of the 1975 film Escape To Witch Mountain. And if you’ve got tweenage children and they’ve ever had a sleepover, with a DVD being put on, then you will have witnessed the awesome power of this film. Johnson is a lovable dad.