Dwayne Johnson Was “Scared” of Serious Roles Before ‘The Smashing Machine’ — Is Oscar Nom Coming?

The Dwayne Johnson Oscar campaign has officially commenced. With just a few days to go before the film premieres at Venice, a splashy Vanity Fair piece has been published hyping up Johnson’s work in Benny Safdie’s “The Smashing Machine.”

Johnson has built up a career on playing larger-than-life figures, but for Safdie’s ‘Smashing Machine,’ the wrestler-turned-Hollywood superstar confronted something that had eluded him in decades of work: genuine fear.

In the Vanity Fair piece, which also features first look images, Johnson, who spent “three to four hours a day” putting on prosthetics, admits he hadn’t felt this kind of nervous anticipation in years.

It was very real. I had not experienced that in a very, very, very long time, where I was really scared and thinking, ‘I don’t know if I can do this. Can I do this?

The film, Safdie’s first solo directorial effort, casts Johnson as Mark Kerr, the troubled MMA fighter whose rise and fall in the late ‘90s came with brutal physical and emotional costs. It’s the kind of raw, and gritty role we don’t associate with Johnson, who’s spent the better part of two decades refining his global action-hero brand.

I realized that maybe these opportunities weren’t coming my way because I was too scared to explore this stuff.

Meanwhile, Safdie says Johnson “was acting with every fiber of his body. It was unreal.”

With “The Smashing Machine,” Johnson seems intent on reinventing himself — less Fast & Furious, more Oscar play. And from the early word around the project, it may be the role that finally breaks him free of the commercial straitjacket he’s spent years comfortably inhabiting. Not too long after wrapping Safdie’s film, Johnson, much to the surprise of everyone, hopped on-board Martin Scorsese’s next film.

I’ve always said that, with the right screenplay, Johnson can be a good actor. He’s a likeable mainstream performer who just has a knack for picking incredibly bad scripts. He has charisma, presence and a real sense of playfulness, but he’s been basically coasting from paycheck to paycheck. His best work still remains the cooked-out bodybuilder he played in Michael Bay’s “Pain and Gain,” a total guilty pleasure set in the dark underworld of Miami iron lifting.

Will Johnson be recognized by Hollywood as a serious actor? That’ll depend on the reviews ‘Smashing Machine’ gets out of Venice this week. Oddly enough, the New York Film Festival, which has been a big supporter of the Safdies’ work, did not select the film, and neither did Telluride. Food for thought.