How a 28-year-old from Kansas City area got to play Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s dad
Joseph Lee Anderson played basketball and baseball in high school. But he never enjoyed watching those sports.
“I was big into wrestling,” the Kansas City, Kansas, native says. “I grew up seeing The Rock, ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin, The Hardy Boyz — all those guys — on “Friday Night SmackDown.”
Now viewers can watch Anderson wrestle in prime time.
The rocketing TV and film actor has scored his biggest role yet on the new NBC comedy “Young Rock,” about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, in the future and the past. Anderson, 28, portrays young Johnson’s real-life father, Rocky, a pro wrestler who inspires his son’s colorful career as a wrestler turned movie star.
More “The Wonder Years” than “WWE Raw,” the series follows Johnson as he runs for president in 2032, where he reflects on moments from his youth that helped shape his life. Three younger actors play him as a kid in the early 1980s surrounded by the era’s celebrity wrestlers, as a high schooler (where he can already pass for a grown man) and as a football player for the national champion University of Miami.
In all three stages of Johnson’s youth, Anderson’s character provides guidance, comic relief and some seriously acrobatic action in the ring.
Critics have been praising both the series (it has an 88% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and Anderson. Said Kristen Baldwin of Entertainment Weekly: “… the cast is fantastic, especially Anderson as Rocky Johnson, a natural showman whose commitment to ‘working the gimmick’ sometimes overshadows his responsibilities as a father and husband.”
“I’ve gotten real good at wrestling,” Anderson says.
“It’s been super-challenging. You know when you’re filming something, you might do it over and over. We would shoot five-minute matches so many times. ‘OK, change the camera. Do it again.’ Then they only use 30 seconds of the whole match.”
Anderson says the drop kick is his best move — he estimates he’s performed about 100 of them during the first season.
It’s an adventure
That’s not the only thing kicking. The series has done well in the ratings, especially on NBC’s digital platforms. The network’s in-house data confirms the “Young Rock” pilot outperformed every other show except for the season premiere of “This Is Us.” It also boasts the most “multigenerational” viewers, meaning more people over 50 watched the series with someone under 18 than any sitcom on any network.
It is truly bringing family viewing back in style, according to Anderson.
“It’s because everyone loves The Rock,” he says. “And we touch so many time periods. We go back to the ’80s with all those wrestling icons, like Andre the Giant. There’s something each week that people can relate to.”
Not that long ago, Anderson was an athletic but relatively slender actor. Once cast, he had two months to get as muscular as possible. He was able to add 50 pounds to his 6-foot-2-inch frame under the tutelage of Los Angeles-based trainer Tim Hamilton.
“It involved a lot of eating right. Like 5,000 calories a day,” says Anderson, who ended up a Herculean 250 pounds during filming. (He’s since “withered” down to 220.)
The weight regimen was hardly the only adventure Anderson encountered. The series was shot in Australia, which provided his first opportunity to travel internationally.
“The state we were in had COVID under control, so everything was like normal. No masks,” he says of Fortitude Valley in Brisbane.
How different was it from home?
“It’s nothing like Kansas. It’s kind of like a cleaner, nicer L.A. But you could go 10 minutes that way, and it would be like Overland Park. Then you go 10 minutes the other way, and it’s like Beverly Hills. So it’s a mix of everywhere, really,” he says. “But I did want to leave when I saw a spider that was as big as my hand!”
The pandemic provided another big impediment. Titular star Johnson didn’t want to spend two weeks in mandatory isolation like all outsiders who first enter the country. So he shot his scenes in Atlanta.
“Unfortunately, we haven’t met in person because of COVID,” Anderson reveals. “But he’s been great. We’re always talking on Instagram. Any time I had a question about anything, he made himself clearly available to me. He’s amazing.”
Hollywood career
The last few years are a whirlwind for Anderson, who moved to Los Angeles in 2014 to further his career. He earned a recurring spot on the CBS drama “S.W.A.T.” (whose showrunner is Aaron Rahsaan Thomas, who also grew up in KCK).
He soon landed some plumb movie roles. He played Oscar nominee Cynthia Erivo’s brother in the period drama “Harriet,” which also starred Janelle Monae, also of KCK. (“I talked with her quite a bit about Kansas,” he recalls.)
And he portrayed one of the main soldiers in Kansas filmmaker Kevin Willmott’s “The 24th,” the true story of an all-Black infantry regiment and its role in the Houston Riot of 1917.
“He’s just a delight to be around and have on set,” says a co-star in “The 24th,” fellow KC actor and L.A. transplant Tosin Morohunfola (“Black Lightning,” “The Chi”). “He can be initially off-putting because he’s so big and intimidating and confident. But once you talk to him or work with him, you realize he’s one big, nerdy teddy bear.”
Both men often find themselves auditioning for the same roles. They first met in Kansas City years ago through indie film connections. But Morohunfola admits he doesn’t remember Anderson very well from that period.
“When I moved to Chicago, we started communicating more. Then we both moved to L.A. and started running into each other. So even though we met in Kansas years ago, we became friends after we ran into each other at an ‘NCIS’ audition,” he says.
Who landed the gig?
“I’m not sure if either of us got the role. But he got one on there very soon after, and then I got one after him. So he led the way,” Morohunfola says.
Their highlight working together occurred on “The 24th.” Morohunfola (who plays a fellow soldier) says the cast developed into “a band of brothers” shooting in the sweltering summer of 2019 in North Carolina.
“Walking past actual Confederate statues as a group of Black actors impersonating Black soldiers, there was a lot of surreal juxtaposition,” he remembers.
Even though Morohunfola is conducting this interview by phone while working out at his gym, he has no plans to get as ripped as Anderson.
“That would be impossible. I don’t have the genetic makeup to do what he has done. But we started at a similar time. Last year when he booked his show, a couple months after, I booked my new TV series. And my character also was supposed to be very athletic and attractive and have perfect muscles — that was literally in the character description: It said ‘a mannequin dripping in dark chocolate,’” says Morohunfola of his leading role in “Run the World,” a new comedy debuting May 16 on Starz.
“So Joe and I are both on insane physical journeys putting on pounds of muscle. This Hollywood machine is crazy in what it does to the way you prioritize appearance.”
What’s next?
Although born in Kansas, Anderson split his time living with his mom in Oklahoma and dad in KCK. He attended Washington High School for a year before finishing his schooling in Oklahoma. He then did one semester at Rogers State University before realizing, “Yeah, I’m gonna go try to be an actor.”
The turning point was a chance brush with an indie production titled “So This Is Christmas” — a family comedy starring Eric Roberts and Vivica A. Fox — shooting in nearby Tulsa.
“They needed some extras. I went just because, and they ended up giving me a line. I kind of fell in love with it right then,” he says of his credit as Student Buying Jacket.
He then secured the part of Maurice King, a teammate of Wilt Chamberlain, in Willmott’s basketball epic “Jayhawkers.” After that, he headed to Los Angeles, where he earned his first network role on “Chicago P.D.”
Meanwhile, he wrote, directed and starred in the short film “The Jog,” about a man’s shifting relationship with the police. It played the prestigious South By Southwest Film Festival and won Best Heartland Narrative Short at Kansas City FilmFest.
“I made it because I wasn’t acting at the time and wanted to get more acting work,” Anderson says. “If you can create your own stuff, then you might get noticed. I did it, and then everyone just wanted me for directing.”
He’s currently concentrating more on acting but says he could see himself directing another movie if the right situation came along.
Anderson is also back living in Kansas City, Kansas. After spending six months shooting in Australia, he realized there was no reason to return to pandemic-ravaged L.A. when no in-person auditions were happening.
“I’m just taping everything from Kansas,” he says. “I’m not a fan of L.A., so I’m going to ride this working remotely thing out.”
While a career in acting has so far been better than he imagined, he does admit to misjudging how opportunities might present themselves after starring in a network TV show.
“I thought that once I would became a series regular, any other job would be easy to get. Offers, offers, offers. But it has been the opposite,” Anderson says.
“I’m doing auditions. They’re good, but just nothing. And I’m like, ‘That’s weird.’ I don’t know if it’s partially because we don’t know what’s happening with a second season of ‘Young Rock.’ When? Where? How? I guess I expected things to be a lot more … just more. But it’s been really chill. Life’s been low-key.”
On Friday, NBC renewed the series for a second season.
He adds, “For now, I’m just enjoying a ‘vacation’ in Kansas.”
Jon Niccum is a filmmaker, freelance writer and author of “The Worst Gig: From Psycho Fans to Stage Riots, Famous Musicians Tell All.”
Where to watch
New episodes of “Young Rock” air at 7 p.m. Tuesdays on NBC and its streaming platforms.
This story was originally published May 2, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "How a 28-year-old from Kansas City area got to play Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s dad."