When Dwayne Johnson really puts a special effort into a challenging performance, he reveals himself as a legitimately talented actor. While it can be said that he has spent the majority of his career playing vaguely similar versions of the same character, for the first time in a long time, audiences got the chance to see that talent shine through last fall with the release of The Smashing Machine. While that didn’t result in Johnson landing a 2026 Oscar nomination, he has earned great respect from his peers – including fellow A-lister Matt Damon.
Johnson and Damon have not yet had the chance to make a movie together, but the two men got the chance to chat together in recent months, and the latter walked away from the conversation immensely impressed. During a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience (shared via Johnson’s Instagram), the Martian star recalled discussing a particular scene in The Smashing Machine and asking how his fellow thespian prepared, and he was extremely impressed by his answer. Said Damon,
There’s this scene in The Smashing Machine where he’s overdosed on drugs and his buddy comes to see him in the hospital. It really walloped me, this scene. I thought it was so great. And I asked him, I was just like, ‘Can you just tell me about the scene? Did Benny [Safdie] write that? Did you work on that scene with him?’ He goes, ‘No, we actually worked on it together.’ And I go, ‘But how did that scene come to be?’ And Dwayne goes, ‘Well, my father was an alcoholic, and when he would talk to me, that’s how he would defend himself. It was almost a bargaining thing.’
In the scene in question, Mark Kerr (Johnson) is laid up in a hospital bed and he carries on an aloof conversation with his friend Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader), who plays along with his pal’s excuse that he is just sick. Johnson carries a kind of childish air about him in the scene, a light giddiness that he may still be at a point that he can excuse away the consequences of his addictions, and the actor apparently went to a very personal place for that moment.
Then, however, the shoe drops: Coleman drops the facade and gets real: he knows exactly why his friend has been hospitalized. The protagonist’s emotional state snaps like a twig, and he begins to cry only after grabbing the hem of his blanket and pulling it up to cover his face. The moment gave the actor another chance to work from another painful memory to inform his performance. Damon continued,
So he explains that about his father, and then he goes, ‘When my mom was diagnosed with stage three lung cancer, I was with her when the oncologist came in and she was lying in the hospital bed. And when he gave her the news, she pulled the sheet up over her head. And I looked at her, and she just looked like a little kid.’ So that is two traumatic events from this guy’s life experience, and the actor in him sees this scene, goes into his memory, pulls these two things out, understands that they’re appropriate for this scene, and he can marry them together in the scene. And then he goes and performs it that way.
That’s some seriously raw stuff, and Johnson deserves immense kudos for his willingness to go to those painful places for the betterment of his craft. It surely must have taken a lot out of him, but the results speak for themselves on the screen, and while the box office numbers weren’t exactly great, one can hope that the response will motivate him to continue trying some big swings and not just stay in the safe comfort of blockbusters and franchise films as is career continues to mature.
