Following the release of his most vulnerable performance yet, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has admitted he felt similarities between himself and Mark Kerr, who he portrays in The Smashing Machine
Former WWE star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has admitted that he’s “not a big therapy guy”, despite suffering from several severe bouts of depression. The 53-year-old actor found the pressure of making Hollywood blockbusters particularly difficult to deal with.
But ahead of his upcoming biopic, the wrestler has opened up about the similarities between him and his troubled character Mark Kerr. The Smashing Machine delves into the life of former wrestler and MMA fighter Kerr, who battled addiction problems and experienced multiple overdoses.
The critically acclaimed movie sees Johnson portray Kerr, whose promising career was derailed by his opioid addiction. Kerr, 56, is now in recovery and on a mission to inspire others to fight their demons and free themselves from addiction.
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He was poignantly inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame in 2025 by Johnson himself. But playing the lead character in the new movie opened up old wounds for the actor, who admits he’s always preferred to “bottle s*** up”.
Speaking to the Guardian, Johnson revealed: “I’m not a big therapy guy. I’ve had some great conversations with therapists but it’s not the thing I run to. I bottle s*** up inside me, like a lot of guys, which I recognise is not the healthiest thing to do.
“Then I said: Wait, I can still do the thing I love, which is acting. But what if there’s something deeper and more meaningful in it for me?”
Moana star Johnson admitted he’d been wanting to do something more hard-hitting for a long time, and playing Kerr revealed similarities between the two wrestlers. He admitted he empathised with the “challenge of having to live up to an image”, and he felt a sense of freedom from the box office pressure.
Although he loves “making the Jumanjis and Moanas”, The Smashing Machine was “so freeing”. Johnson was happy for there to be less of a focus on the money and more on the “process”.
Fast & Furious star Johnson previously opened up about his mental health issues on The Pivot Podcast. When he left school he had his first brush with depression, revealing: “At that time … I didn’t know what mental health was, I didn’t know what depression was, I just knew I didn’t want to be there.”
Speaking to former NFL stars Ryan Clark, Fred Taylor and Channing Crowder, he shared aspects of his mental-health journey and the “three bouts of depression” he has faced. He experienced it again when he divorced his first wife, Dany Garcia in 2008, and then again in 2017.
He told the hosts: “Luckily at that time, I had some friends I could lean on and say, ‘Hey you know I’m feeling a little wobbly now, got a little struggle happening, I’m seeing a little gray and not the blue.”
His mother also had her own experiences with depression. In a 2019 interview with the Express, he revealed he had saved his mum from a suicide attempt as she stepped onto a freeway in Nashville when he was just 15.
He said: “I grabbed her and pulled her back on the gravel shoulder of the road. We both healed, but we’ve always got to do our best to pay attention when other people are in pain. We have to help them through it and remind them they are not alone.”
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