Donning an understated maroon collared shirt and a carefully tweezed and groomed goatee, Dwayne Johnson is all business this Monday afternoon.

It is difficult to believe that this subdued sandy-colored man is one and the same with the wrestler The Rock, who once weekly exhorted audiences to “smell what The Rock is cookin’!” But he doesn’t mind that a sliver of the black tattoo emblazoned across his chest peeks through his unbuttoned shirt and hints at his not-so-secret past. Indeed, the Rock is proud of the career path that led to his unexpected fall into acting.

“The wrestling vehicle made sense for me since I grew up in wrestling,” he says. “I didn’t grow up across the street from Juilliard.”

Yet, despite his professed pride in his past profession, the six-foot five-inch, 255-pound Miami native has seemingly distanced himself from his wrestling persona over the course of his acting career, catalyzing an image evolution that he insists is unintentional but only natural.

“What’s interesting is, it’s almost taken care of itself,” says Johnson. “For the past six months, I have been introduced as Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson, without a concerted effort on my part. But to me [the name is] no big deal.”

OUT OF THE STONE AGE

With Walking Tall, Johnson extends his convincing farewell to the days of five-minute mostly-mute bit parts, exemplified by his debut role as the Scorpion King in 2001’s The Mummy Returns. The journey began with the 2002 Mummy spin-off The Scorpion King and continued with last year’s The Rundown, for which he received a fair amount of critical praise. Johnson, however, was not content to expand just his acting chops in only his third lead role in a feature film, and he relished the opportunity to creatively contribute to Walking Tall from its inception to its production.

In fact, Johnson confessed, it was precisely his fascination with the creative synthesis of a film that led him to fully devote himself to acting.

“[On the set of The Mummy Returns], I thought it was amazing that it was all put together like this: with cast, crew, production—everything,” he says. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’m really a part of something there that’s really unique, and when I watch this on film, I know that I am going to be transported into this world.’”

But as Johnson embarked on the production of Walking Tall, he discovered that making a movie is not all fun and games. He says that his filmmaking responsibilities in the interpretation of such a popular, true-life story were particularly daunting.

An ardent fan of the 1973 version of Walking Tall, Johnson understood the heightened audience expectations for a remake of such a classic film and promised himself that he would only contribute to an effort that could maintain the quality of the original.

“It’s a little hairy trying to remake something that was actually pretty good cold, so we had to be careful,” he says. “The most important thing to me was to keep the intensity and rawness and the theme of Walking Tall—and what it means to walk tall, a story about standing up for yourself.”

Since the film is loosely based on a true story of good triumphing over evil, Johnston was also sensitive to maintaining the integrity of the legendary Buford Pusser story and obliged himself to truthfully adapt the film after personally meeting with the Pusser family.

“I wanted to let them know I have respect for his story, know that [Walking Tall] isn’t just Hollywood stretching of the truth,” he says.

With that goal in mind, Walking Tall aims to present a classic tale of redemption and revenge, a film about a homecoming soldier so morally offended by the corruption that has seized his hometown that he takes matters into his own righteous hands. Just how successfully the somewhat underdeveloped plotline accomplishes these aims is arguable. But in an era of directing when films race to distinguish themselves through bigger and noisier special effects, Walking Tall is a refreshing exception to the trend.