With $65 million earned in 2017, Dwayne Johnson is the second highest-paid actor in the world, but when he was young it wasn’t all milk and honey for him. He is the successful man, and he often talks about the life he had before becoming one of the biggest names in Hollywood.
In one of the most recent videos that he posted on Instagram, he again points out how you need to fight every day and give all you got to be successful. He was filming Disney’s Jungle Cruise on Hawaii, and he remembered how it was for him to live there.
He started by saying how he grew up there and that his family was struggling. It was hard for them to pay the rent and to have enough money for even basic stuff. He said: “You know, this life here, this was never my dream. My dream was that I just didn’t want to be evicted anymore.”
He continued by adding: “You know you’re getting your ass kicked when your rent is due by the week. We had a weekly rent and we couldn’t even afford that. Eventually we got kicked off the island, we got evicted.”
During his teenage years, Dwayne watched struggle of his parents to make ends meet. They lived in one-bedroom apartment but couldn’t pay the rent, and their car got repossessed. As a result, they had to leave the state. Just like always with teenagers, it was hard for Johnson who was angry at his father because they were often moving and he was rarely at home. When he was only 14, he started getting into heaps of trouble, fights and problematic behavior. In the end, he joined the gang that was robbing stores all around Waikiki and had a few encounters with police during that time.
Here is what he said to The Hollywood Reporter: “We were living in an efficiency that cost $120 a week. We come home, and there’s a padlock on the door and an eviction notice. My mom starts bawling. She just started crying and breaking down. ‘Where are we going to live? What are we going to do?’ ”
Dwayne didn’t want this to be his life, and he started training as it was the only thing he could do. All that hard work paid out, even he didn’t make it as a professional football player he began his wrestling career. He set his goals high, to become a wrestling champ and later on to be a big star.
We are sure that if someone told Dwayne when he was 14 or 15 that he would be as successful as he is today, he would laugh and not believe it. But today, he is one of the biggest stars in the movie industry and earns big bucks from his projects.
