ClayMation
04-25-2013, 05:48 AM
MIAMI — In the fact-based crime flick “Pain & Gain,” Dwayne Johnson makes a huge leap from his usual hero/warrior roles of “GI Joe: Retaliation” and “Fast Five.” As Paul Doyle, Johnson is a not-too-smart, impressionable, muscle-bound ex-con who helps another bodybuilder/trainer (Mark Wahlberg) kidnap and rob a client (Tony Shaloub). The scheme soon escalates to murder.
Johnson, who turns 41 on May 2, calls Doyle “a de*fining role for me and a really de*fining movie. It’s such a departure from anything that I’ve done in my career, which is going on 13 years. I’ve never played a character before that was this vulnerable and this easily influenced.
“He goes from trying to find his salvation in Jesus to sniffing cocaine off a woman’s backside ” He gained 15 pounds to play Doyle. “I was in the groove anyways because I was training and just came off of ‘G.I. Joe’ but this particular look was different.
“Aside from the psychological prep, there was a lot of baby oil. It smelled good,” he joked. A Miami resident for two decades, Johnson had known about the notorious case. “I was down here during that time when the trial rocked the city,” he said at Miami’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel. “The script has all this explicit detail that I didn’t remember hearing about when I was here in ’95. It was just shocking.”
He credits director Michael Bay (“Transformers”) with “smart storytelling, because in the beginning you want to go on a journey with these guys. They’re kind of likable — in this weird, bizarre way.
“But at the end all that gets thrown out the window and you are happy and satisfied that they get punished.” While Johnson has played “two or three real men,” Doyle, he pointed out, “is actually a composite of a multitude of men who were involved in this crime. It was a lot of minds put into one in this case.”
How many exactly? “Three or four ... or two,” he said.
(“Pain & Gain” opens tomorrow.)
- Boston Herald
Johnson, who turns 41 on May 2, calls Doyle “a de*fining role for me and a really de*fining movie. It’s such a departure from anything that I’ve done in my career, which is going on 13 years. I’ve never played a character before that was this vulnerable and this easily influenced.
“He goes from trying to find his salvation in Jesus to sniffing cocaine off a woman’s backside ” He gained 15 pounds to play Doyle. “I was in the groove anyways because I was training and just came off of ‘G.I. Joe’ but this particular look was different.
“Aside from the psychological prep, there was a lot of baby oil. It smelled good,” he joked. A Miami resident for two decades, Johnson had known about the notorious case. “I was down here during that time when the trial rocked the city,” he said at Miami’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel. “The script has all this explicit detail that I didn’t remember hearing about when I was here in ’95. It was just shocking.”
He credits director Michael Bay (“Transformers”) with “smart storytelling, because in the beginning you want to go on a journey with these guys. They’re kind of likable — in this weird, bizarre way.
“But at the end all that gets thrown out the window and you are happy and satisfied that they get punished.” While Johnson has played “two or three real men,” Doyle, he pointed out, “is actually a composite of a multitude of men who were involved in this crime. It was a lot of minds put into one in this case.”
How many exactly? “Three or four ... or two,” he said.
(“Pain & Gain” opens tomorrow.)
- Boston Herald