"Should I have stayed in wrestling a bit longer?"- When Dwayne Johnson opened up about having doubts on his acting career

Dwayne Johnson is among the highest-paid actors in the world, with practically one of the biggest fanbases in Hollywood. However, this wasn't always the case when the actor transitioned from being a professional wrestler to an A-list actor. Johnson, also known by his moniker The Rock, first appeared in The Mummy Returns (2001) but claimed that he had to struggle for quite a while before he got a smooth sailing-career.

In an interview from 2015 with Esquire, Dwayne Johnson opened up about his initial days in acting and how he was often filled with self-doubt. He even revealed he wondered whether he should have stayed with wrestling longer.

Answering a question about whether he felt self-doubt while starting out in his acting career, Johnson said:

"When I first came into acting, I had great opportunities to make a decent movie. I had a run there in 2005, '06, '07—for a long time it was "Oh, he's the best thing in the movie that's not that good." I started questioning: Did I make the right choice? Should I have stayed in wrestling a bit longer? And then budgets became lower and lower and the pay kinda stayed the same and there wasn't a lot of growth."

As a follow-up to this, he also answered how he had to physically change to fit Hollywood standards.

"There were a lot of changes"- Dwayne Johnson on changing for Hollywood

As a former wrestler and football player, Dwayne Johnson was hardly similar to anyone in Hollywood. In fact, he had to work quite hard to slim down and be similar-looking to everyone else in the industry, or at least as close as possible to them.

Speaking about this in the same interview with Esquire, Johnson said:

"The big stars didn't look like me—and I didn't look like them. There wasn't a blueprint or a model. Well, here's a former football player who once wrestled and he's this height and this weight. He's black and Samoan and he has tattoos... And then it was slim down, stop working out as much, get distance from wrestling and the moniker of the Rock."

As he had to adapt quite significantly, he claimed there were many big changes that came with becoming a permanent part of the industry. He added:

"There were a lot of changes—the people around me at that time felt like it was the best thing to do, but by the way, I bought into it. I embraced it. Well, like anything, when you start being someone else, not being yourself, you may get lucky and it may work for a little while, but it's gonna come back and bite you in the a** eventually."

Ultimately, Dwayne Johnson said that he had a moment of clarity in 2010, following which he embraced this career more wholeheartedly and has since been at peace with his work. He concluded:

"So there was a big moment of clarity in about 2010—I just felt, Yeah, this isn't working. I need to stop, readjust, reassess, and change everything around me—and I gotta take one more shot, but at least. I'm gonna take a shot with me being myself."

Dwayne Johnson has so far had a brilliant career in the industry and is now looking for an upheaval with more serious roles. He will soon appear in A24's The Smashing Machine, which may completely alter the actor's image.

Moreover, he has also reportedly joined Martin Scorsese for his upcoming crime movie, which will be set in Hawaii.

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