The Rock Talks His Family Getting COVID, Dealing With Racism Growing Up
As of writing, over 27 million people in the United States have tested positive for COVID-19 and that includes wrestling legend and entertainment icon The Rock. In September The Rock revealed in an Instagram video that his entire household had tested positive including his wife and his two youngest daughters.
The Rock talked more about his COVID experience and how quickly it spread in an interview in Cigar Aficionado.
"In a 24-hour period, it had spread so quickly to our nanny, our nanny's teenage kids, her husband. Myself and my two-year-old daughter, we were the last ones standing until the very end, but of course we both tested positive," revealed The Rock. "We were on the fortunate end for something that has been so traumatic to the world. We got through it."
In recent years The Rock has gotten more into producing in addition to acting as he served as the executive producer of the HBO series Ballers. Now Rock has another TV series hitting the airwaves soon as NBC will be broadcasting a show based on his life.
Young Rock will premiere next week and it chronicles the early years of Dwayne Johnson. The Rock is an executive producer for the show and will also act in it and he talked more about what fans can expect from the show.
"We go back and we illuminate timelines in my life, living a very on-the-go lifestyle. In the world of pro wrestling, there was such an intersection of worlds that I had, meeting professional athletes, from Muhammad Ali—my dad would spar with Ali, my dad was also a boxer, he would spar with George Foreman...You can imagine what my dinners were like, with Andre the Giant and these wrestling stars...It begins at about 10 years old, then 15 years old, and then 18 years old," stated The Rock.
One of the things that the show will explore is the Rock's unique heritage of being half Black and half Samoan. That also led to him facing discrimination while growing up and he revealed when and where that took place.
"When I was a kid, up until I was 10, 11 years old, we were in Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina," said The Rock. "So, it was predominantly throughout the south, where racial prejudice was pretty prevalent, pretty strong."
Rock has been open about his troubled childhood which included "eight or nine arrests" by the time he was 17. He talked about the issues he had as a teenager and how the circumstances he was living in played into those struggles.
"That's when I started getting arrested and getting into trouble. The dumb sh*t that I was doing—from theft, fighting, truancy, skipping school—looking back I was one of those kids who was always playing angry, because of the situation that I was in. I didn't realize it at the time," admitted The Rock.
Young Rock premieres on Tuesday, February 16th on NBC.