Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson Wax Statue 2.0 Unveiled By Museum After Design Outcry
Image via Musée Grévin
The Musée Grévin in Paris was stuck between The Rock and a hard place when it first presented its Dwayne Johnson wax figure. The statue sported a visibly lighter complexion, a mistake that the museum chalked up to it misinterpreting reference shots.
The internet did not mince its words with the botched job, comparing the earlier sculpture to Mr Clean and saying it was “melanin-deficient.” In response, the museum promised to redo the waxwork. The updated version depicts Johnson’s likeness with darker skin, paying closer homage to his Black-Samoan roots.
The Rock had a role in its overhaul, previously stating that his team had reached out to the attraction to work out “some important details and improvements—starting with my skin color.” Well, what can he say except, “You’re welcome”?
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“And next time I’m in Paris, I’ll stop in and have a drink with myself,” the actor joked.
Capturing the former WWF wrestler had been a laborious effort from the start. First of all, the statue’s makers never met Johnson, instead relying on a set of photos while drawing from the physique of a near-identical stand-in scouted at a gym. It took 10 days for the artists to mimic his tattoos, and they said they had to rework his eyes three times as they didn’t look “warm” enough.
“We worked on his face and eyes several times, because the most complicated thing about realism is getting the statue to come alive from the visitors’ perspective,” sculptor Stéphane Barret said then. As it turned out, the eyes weren’t the hardest part.
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With more strokes of oil painting added in, the redesign also introduces more texture to the skin of The Rock’s likeness, making the artwork look less “botoxed,” as described by the Hollywood Reporter.
Alas, some people still think the do-over misses the mark. “Y’all have to melt buddy down and try again,” one person comments on Instagram. “The first one looked more like him than this,” another writes.
Others lament that the statue is still too light-skinned. “They need to put that back in the oven for about two hours,” jokes one person.
Veronique Berecz, Grévin’s head of PR, tells Variety that the museum considers The Rock’s reaction to the original to be quite friendly, and it agreed that the waxwork was indeed too fair-looking. She explains that recreating a person’s image based on pictures alone “can be very tricky” due to how “nuances of skin tones” can vary under different lighting.
The museum’s representative stresses that whitewashing was not its intention and that it was “an honest mistake.”
[via Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Pop Crave, images via various sources]
