Everyone knows the picture: a young Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, looking ripped and sporting a pencil-thin mustache. Surely a picture of the wrestler-turned-actor in his early WWE days, right? Wrong, it’s a 15-year-old Johnson, looking like a full-blown adult who must have terrified the fellow teenagers at his high school. The actor has even joked that his fellow students thought he was an undercover cop. It’s an absurd idea — one that may be absurd enough for a TV show.
And it is. Johnson’s childhood has been turned into an NBC sitcom called Young Rock, a comedy executive produced by Fresh Off the Boat creators Nanatchka Khan and Jeff Chiang, which aims to tell the actor’s origin story. Watch the Young Rock trailer below.
Young Rock Trailer
Khan and Chiang have some experience turning a true story of a famous celebrity into great comedy TV, making chef Eddie Huang’s childhood into the well-liked series Fresh Off the Boat. And now they’re working their magic on Dwayne Johnson’s childhood, though they won’t have to do much considering how much of a larger-than-life figure the actor is — literally.
At 6’4 and 225 pounds as a 15-year-old, Johnson intimidated the students at each of the four high schools he attended in his family’s frequent moves from Honolulu, to Nashville, to Pennsylvania. But even a giant teenager has his own insecurities, as we see in the Young Rock trailer, which shows the 15-year-old Dwayne introducing himself to his classmates as “Tomas” because “it sounds way cooler than Dwayne.” The sitcom will follow Johnson’s life from preteen years to young adulthood, via three actors: Adrian Groulx as 10-year-old Johnson, Bradley Constant as 15-year-old Johnson, and Uli Latukefu as 18-20-year-old Johnson.
“We’re going to find Young Rock, for example, wreaking havoc in the streets of Hawaii when I was a very young teenager, getting arrested seemingly every single week, doing a lot of things I shouldn’t have been doing,” Johnson said at last year’s Television Critics Association presentation, where NBC announced the comedy series. “Still a good kid. Then from there of course we were evicted off the island and forced to leave the island and move to of all places Nashville, TN where again I continued to get in trouble. Then we go into my high school years and then onto Young Rock as a University of Miami football star if you will until I got beat out of my position by a guy by the name of Warren Sapp who just happened to go on to become one of the greatest defensive tackles of all time.”
Young Rock premieres on NBC on February 16, 2021.
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