Young Rock: Did A Homeless Man Really Die In Dwayne Johnson's Car?
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has TV audiences smelling what he's cooking with his new sitcom Young Rock, based on his life before he put his boot in the behind of every jabroni in the WWE and then took Hollywood by storm. According to his official WWE bio, The Rock used to cock an eyebrow at his rivals and shout from the ring that he was "the most electrifying man in all of entertainment." Then he went on to prove it. Now we're seeing exactly how he made that happen.
But, just how accurate is Young Rock? For example, do the actors who play him really look like he did at those ages? Did he really call wrestling fake when he was younger? And another scene in the show's pilot episode, titled "Working the Gimmick," has us wondering if a homeless man really did die in a car he bought for next to nothing. Let's do some digging and see if we can find out how true that part of the show is to the reality of Dwayne Johnson's wild life.
A young Dwayne Johnson did find a homeless man in his car
In a classic instance of "yes, but," yes, there was a car involved, but fortunately, the man didn't die in it. Cinema Blend tracked down an interview Johnson did in 2013 for the Fast & Furious movies, and he told the story of finding a homeless man in his first car, which he bought when he was 15 years old and living in Nashville, Tennessee. Although he was underage, he and a buddy were hanging out at a bar when a man he described as a "crackhead" came in and asked them if they wanted to buy a car for $75. He and his friend scraped the money together and bought it, a '79 Ford Thunderbird. Then, as if buying a car for $75 wasn't strange enough, the story got weirder.
"As I was driving down the road me and my buddy we heard some noise in the back and we look back and there was another crackhead passed out on the floor!" he said. So yeah, it appears that the story is partly true, but luckily the guy didn't die back there.
So what happened to the car? Johnson said that the vehicle was a steal, probably literally. The guy who sold it to him didn't give him the key to the gas tank, so he couldn't put any more fuel in it. "It was probably stolen anyway, so I trashed it at a Burger King."