How The Rock Became The Highest-Paid Actor In The World!

The highest-paid actor in the world is also one of the nicest — and he’s open about the bumps in the road on his way to the top

- Jaime Harkin

He’s 6-foot-4 and weighs 260 pounds, most of which is pure muscle. When he singlehandedly stopped a torpedo with his bare hands while hanging out of a speeding truck in 2017’s The Fate of the Furious, audiences barely batted an eye. Yes, it’s an undeniable fact: Former college footballer turned pro wrestler turned action star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is tough as nails.

But anyone close to the 47-year-old knows that his heart is even bigger than his bulging biceps. The father of three — Simone, 17 (with his exwife and producing partner, Dany Garcia), and Jasmine, 3, and Tia, 15 months, with his longtime girlfriend, 34-year-old singer-songwriter Lauren Hashian — is a family man at the core who says his girls remind him “of what’s really important in life, and why I work the way I do.”

They also bring out a more vulnerable side of the star — one we don’t often see in his movies, or in the Instagram videos he posts of his hardcore 4 a.m. workouts. “I grew up an only child,” he told Us at the July 13 premiere of his latest flick, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw. “My dad was tough. He kicked my ass — there was a lot of testosterone growing up — so there’s this balance, having all this estrogenic energy.”

ROUGH START

The actor wasn’t always so in touch with his emotions.He spent much of his childhood moving around with his wrestler dad, Rocky, and mom, Ata. By the end of junior high, Johnson had lived in 13 different states.

When he was 12, they settled in Hawaii, close to Ata’s family. “That’s when things got rough,” Johnson recalls. He started getting into fights, stealing and getting arrested. “Times were lean,” he says. (In a 2017 Instagram post he mentioned that his family couldn’t afford Thanksgiving dinner when he was a teenager.)