The Rock's Secret to On-Screen Crying: He Will Always Love Whitney

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (Eric Charbonneau/Invision/AP)

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is one action star who’s in touch with his sensitive side. In a New York Times profile from this weekend, the wrestler-turned-actor reveals that crying onscreen in his new film San Andreas was no trouble at all. He just had to channel the sensation of listening to Whitney Houston.

“I can cry like that  — I hear a song sometimes, ‘Didn’t We Almost Have It All,’ by Whitney Houston,” Johnson tells the reporter, who writes that the actor’s face “crumpled into sadness” at the end of the sentence.

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Eighties ballads are just one of the tools in Johnson’s acting arsenal. While researching his characters, he picks out a specific scent that each would wear. For example, for his upcoming spy comedy Central Intelligence (co-starring Kevin Hart), he chose Kenzo cologne. As the search-and-rescue officer in San Andreas, he wore the pricey French cologne Creed. And for the Fast and Furious films, in which he plays justice-obsessed DSS agent Luke Hobbs, Johnson rubbed baby oil on his skin —  and told the make-up artists not to remove any sweat. “We’re on the go,” he told them.

Clearly, Johnson puts one hundred percent into everything he does, including such mundane habits as taking selfies. At the London premiere of San Andreas last week, the actor set a new Guinness World Record for taking the most selfies in under three minutes, snapping a total of 105 photos with a line of eager fans.

“We just set a NEW GUINNESS WORLD RECORD for most self portraits (selfies) taken in record time (“yup, a selfie world record exists and your arm gets a helluva workout),” he wrote on Instagram. No doubt he also had a perfect scent picked out for the occasion.

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