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Dwayne Johnson Became the World’s Biggest Movie Star. Now He’s Trying To Disappear.

It’s hard for Dwayne Johnson to hide. Wherever he goes, there he is—as conspicuous out in the world as he is on the silver screen. But after two decades of playing a version of himself in huge movies, suddenly - he is ready to do something entirely new: vanish.

This year, Johnson chose to produce and star in The Smashing Machine, in which he plays a character based on an early MMA fighter named Mark Kerr, who rose to prominence in the ’90s and whose struggles with addiction nearly killed him. (When I make a passing joke about this—“That’s some real rich-guy shit right there” is what I say; I’m not particularly proud of this—Johnson later sends me an eight-minute voice note, explaining in detail his thought process about the scientists and the habitat he hired them to build.) It’s a testament to Johnson’s ability to sell a role based on more or less any premise—Special Forces–trained primatologist who teams up with a rage-prone gorilla; immortal riverboat guide; Polynesian trickster demigod—that you probably didn’t blink at the “Santa Claus’s bodyguard” thing.

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