The Rock Revealed He Was Told to 'Lose Some Weight' When He Started Acting
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has conquered the world of wrestling, TV, and film. On Monday, Hollywood's highest-paid actor added another award to his ever-growing collection when he accepted MTV's Generation Award at the 2019 MTV Movie and TV Awards.
Johnson previously teased that he was going to bring something "very cool" to the MTV stage, and he definitely delivered. Before Johnson went on stage to accept his award, dancers came on stage to Queen’s "We Will Rock You." The dancers performed a step dance and a traditional Samoan dance in honor of Johnson's Black and Samoan heritage.
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The Rock then took the stage, and he gave an inspirational, powerful speech about self-acceptance and the power of kindness. He told the crowd that when he started out in Hollywood, he was told to lose weight-and ultimately decided not to conform to those ridiculous standards.
Here's a full transcript of The Rock's speech:
I want to say thank you to MTV for this awesome, you know, really incredible prestigious award. I also want to thank my family at home, my girls. I got a house full of strong-ass women at home! Of course, thank you to my team, my business partners, but mainly I want to thank the ones who make this whole thing happen. I want to thank you, the people, the fans. I thank you. All of you at home. You are the reason I’m getting this, so I want to share a really quick lesson with you guys that I’ve learned over the years. I want to share a really quick lesson with you guys that I’ve learned over the years. The most powerful thing that we can be is ourselves...When I first got to Hollywood, Hollywood, they didn’t know what the hell to do with me. I mean, I was half-black, half-Samoan, 6 foot 4, 275-pound pro wrestler. I was told at that time, 'Well, you gotta be a certain way. You gotta drop some weight. You gotta be somebody different. You gotta stop working out. You gotta stop calling yourself The Rock.' I made a choice, and the choice was, I wasn’t gonna conform to Hollywood. Hollywood was gonna conform to me. So Hollywood conformed to me and here I am with all of you getting the Generation Award, holy shit! What you saw up here tonight is who I am, I’m proudly half-black and half-Samoan and I wanted to bring those cultures here, up here for the world to see. So, yes it’s important that you are your most authentic self. But that’s not enough. Because there’s another side to being your authentic self, your true self, and that’s the side that the magic is on. That’s the side that’s gold. And yes it's important to be yourself but you gotta recognize the joy and the responsibility of bringing everybody with you. We bring everybody with us, and you do that by being kind, by being compassionate, by being inclusive, and straight-up just being good to people because that matters. And if you can hit that place, that’s when you become powerful, that’s when you become influential, that’s when you can have real global influence in a positive way. So that's it and I leave you with this - when I was 15 years old I heard a quote and I will never forget it, I bring it with me everywhere I go and it's ingrained in my DNA. The quote is this: It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.
A post shared by therock (@therock) on Jun 16, 2019 at 3:26pm PDT
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