Universal PicturesDwayne Johnson didn't get to where he is by being petty.
The veteran of TV, film and the ever-boisterous WWE is famous for his infectious personality and good-natured shenanigans (not to mention his recognizable physique and the lengths to which he goes to maintain it) and always seems to be the life of the set while still being the consummate pro.
Forbes just crowned him the highest-paid actor in the business right now, as well as ranked him No. 19 on its list of the 100 top-earning celebrities over the past year, with a cocked-eyebrow-worthy $64.5 million.
And he's a delightful fellow, according to so many of his fellow stars.
"It's awful! I've never seen an attitude so high and uppity," Kevin Hart told The Hollywood Reporter about his Central Intelligence co-star. "D.J. is one of the best guys in the world. He's a friend/brother now. We're doing great things together.
"More importantly, he's a positive guy that wants to see good for people. I'm the same, man. We believe in love, we believe in laughter, and we believe in living right. When you find yourself with a person like that, that attitude becomes contagious, and together, you spread a lot of that positive energy. That's what we've done."
Sounds like a rave review.
And how about this ringing endorsement from Zac Efron?
"He wants to make an impact beyond acting," the actor told The Times in the U.K. about Johnson, his co-star in the upcoming Baywatch movie. "He could run for president. F--k it, he'd be better than anyone at this point."
A literal endorsement.
And you'd think a guy doesn't get to that point, when his fellow entertainers are ready to vote him into the White House, if he's not at the very least diplomatic, if not the most popular guy in the room.
Even WWE and Total Bellas star John Cena, who's taking a page from The Rock's playbook as he ventures into film and hosting gigs, positively gushed about his former wrestling nemesis in a radio interview this past April.
"Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson is so spectacular and continues to move at such a breakneck pace and do stuff that is breaking not just WWE records. He is just on a ship into new waters. He's finding some new territory," Cena told REAL 92.3. "And man, is he a fantastic human being. It's one of those things, like, I guess, when you have so much [animosity] towards somebody, you kind of gain respect after you beat the crap out of each other. And, man, over a two-year period did I ever gain respect for his vision of what he wants to do, not only in life, but how it impacts [or] affects people around him, and, like, what I do for a living. What he's doing is spectacular."
That's coming from someone Johnson famously feuded with.
So that's why this is the double-take moment that it is.
Pretty much out of nowhere, Johnson burst forth yesterday with a most uncharacteristic Facebook post in which he slammed "some" of his male co-stars from Fast 8, now in the midst of a presumably awkward final week of shooting.
"Some conduct themselves as stand up men and true professionals, while others don't The ones that are too chicken s—t to do anything about it anyway. Candy asses," the actor, for whom Fast 8 is his fourth appearance in the billion-dollar franchise, posted Monday.
Perhaps the second-most remarkable thing about the outburst, other than that it happened at all, was the fact that he made a point of being polite to his female co-stars ("always amazing and I love 'em"), lest we mistake them as the cause of his ire), the hard-working crew and Universal. He even threw in a looped video of Hobbs throwing a bad guy against a wall, so...a branded punctuation mark, if you will.
Nothing if not a diplomat and a businessman with an eye on the bottom line.
The shock factor is only heightened by the glowing things that co-stars, including those from F&F, have had to say about him. But even more so, this is coming from a man who has never memorably complained one whit about the personal atmosphere on a set or evidenced anything else resembling the animosity he's feeling after this one.
Jason Statham, whose villainous Deckard Shaw has a memorable confrontation with Johnson's Hobbs in Furious 7, told Hit Fix last year that shooting fight scenes with the former wrestling star is no joke—but fun just the same.
"He's a f--king 260 pound man who moves like a middleweight," the veteran British actor described his 6-foot-4 co-star. "As soon as you start, he is right in there, throwing punches, and he'll work on it until it's right. 'No, no, no, that's not going to work. Maybe I come in with this; I come back; smash boom,' and it's over. This is his domain. He's done, you know, we call it fake fighting because we're not really hitting each other. He's been doing that his whole career. It's like no one knows better than Dwayne how to sell something."
"The reality is he could f—king take your head off if he connected," Statham added. "The fact that we're not connecting means we can film another scene later on in the day. He's the ultimate pro. His skill is extraordinary, and he's fun to f—king work with."
Another check in the consummate-pro column for Johnson, and this one coming from someone who may have witnessed exactly what went down on the set of Fast 8.
All the more reason to be obsessed with whatever tipped the scales for Johnson this time around—because it had to be something in order to shake the perennially unflappable Dwayne Johnson, who sounded thrilled to be joining the franchise (and yet undertook the challenge with his characteristic utmost gravity) when he signed on for Fast Five.
"I've known [Vin Diesel] for a long time an we've always talked about doing something together, but as long as it was right and wasn't forced," he told Screen Rant in 2011. "This felt like the right opportunity to create a formidable adversary for him and one that was believable and that we could get on screen and rumble and dance and have some fun."
But while he's not known for being a diva, and Zac Efron would vote for him for president, because Johnson takes his work so seriously, it's not a huge leap to guess that he doesn't have a lot of patience for those who don't mirror his work ethic.
Talking about his unlikely journey from having $7 to his name (hence his company, Seven Bucks Production) to being a WWE legend and then a major box-office draw and star of his own HBO show, Johnson told Esquire a year ago, "These young bucks come in and think they know everything when they really don't know s--t. The best thing you can do is be quiet and open your ears. Let everybody else talk."
What he has had up till yesterday, it just became apparent, is self-control, since surely this isn't the first time that he's been pissed off by someone else's behavior on set.
So while The Rock hasn't cooked in the ring for a while, Dwayne Johnson may have been quietly simmering—and obviously that flame had to have been turned way up to make him boil over.
(E! News and Universal Entertainment are both members of the NBCUniversal family.)