The Rock is running for President… it’s an idea some fans have wanted to come to fruition in real life, but it’ll have to live on as a plot device in his new NBC TV show for now.
Dwayne Johnson was a recent guest on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon to promote NBC’s Young Rock, which sees three different actors play Johnson in addition to “The Great One” appearing as a future version of himself. As it turns out, the show sees The Rock running for President in 2032, and he explained to Fallon how the show’s creator came up with the idea (and what convinced him to agree to it).
“It was our show creator, Nahnatchka Khan, who is such a brilliant woman. We were trying to figure out a way— first of all, we wanted to figure out three points in my life that were defining times. When I was 10 years old living here in Hawaii, when I was 15 years old after multiple arrests and doing a lot of things I shouldn’t have been doing,” Johnson explained, “and then when I was 18 years old and I started to get my life back on track by going to the University Of Miami. Then she had said, ‘Ultimately, the audience is going to want to see you. What’s a creative way that we could infuse you into the show?’”
“So we sat for a few weeks,” he said, “she came up with the idea, she said, ‘What if we set it in 2032 and you’re running for President?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, it feels a little political’ and she goes, ‘Well, there might be a few people that want to see you run for President, so think about it.’ So I went home and I talked to Lauren [Hashian, his wife], as you and I do, we go home and talk to our wives and Lauren said ‘I think you should do it’ and that was it.”
Khan also served as creator and executive producer of Fresh Off the Boat, ABC’s highly-successful sitcom that just wrapped a six-season run. Young Rock premieres on Tuesday, February 16 on NBC.
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Check out a portion of The Rock’s interview with Fallon below:
