Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is promoting his Hercules movie, which comes out this summer. The movie looks completely cheesy, but that’s become The Rock’s signature acting style. I’m curious about whether he can carry an action movie on his own since he’s relied so heavily upon ensemble movies lately. This movie will do okay, right? Much better than that Kellan Lutz version of Hercules.

In a new interview with Collider, The Rock talks about his damn yak beard again. That thing took 2.5 hours to attach daily, and I just don’t understand why. I mean … look at it. That beard is the only thing stopping me from giving up all my material possessions and following The Rock around the world. That beard kills my libido. It looks unnatural. Gross, even. If this movie fails, it will be the fault of the yak beard.

The whole Collider interview is epically long, so I cut it down a lot. Mostly I wanted to talk about this story because The Rock reveals a heart-rending story about growing up poor. This is a sweet story about how he wanted to save his mom in a roundabout way by building up his muscles:

The Rock does Hercules’ dialogue: “A few one-liners, sure. I think that always makes it fun, trying to create a heroic character and putting your own twist on it and injecting your own personality into it. You know, the group of actors we had around, everybody came with their A game, all ready to make something that was really, really special. All the actors came on-board knowing that there was another Hercules already being made, knowing that there were other versions of Hercules in the past, in movies and on TV. So everyone got together and wanted to pay homage to the mythology and bring their unique twist.”

The damn yak beard: “The beard that I had was the full beard, and a lot of times in Hollywood, as you guys know, it’s a lace beard that we put on, and they take 30, 45 minutes, an hour tops. This took two and half hours — three hours, because we had very long strips of yak hair — really, yak hair — and they would cut them up probably and inch long and a quarter inch wide, and the process was, they would lay these on my face piece by piece by piece by piece. It was a very, very long process. But in that, what you get is something that is really spectacular. The first couple of days of camera testing and seeing it and recognizing, “Hey, we’ve got something really special. Let’s do our best to make sure that nothing is revealed.”

His fight training: “I can fake it pretty good. In the loin cloth, it’s an interesting jump. Well, in terms of the fighting style, I thought it was a very raw fighting style. That had a lot to do with club combat, because Hercules has his famous club. So that was a fun fighting style, because it didn’t involve any guns or a specialized fighting style other than he is just a vicious, raw man who is pretty good at what he does. Really, that’s it. But the training — not necessarily the fighting training, but the training in terms of gym training and things like that, that was a lot different than I had ever done. I trained harder for this role than I ever had before. You get one shot at Hercules, so it was about eight months of training, of prep, of fun mythology study, dialect coach, things like that. It was a very long process.”

How he decided to bulk up: “It started for me when I was 14. When I was a kid, we were in Hawaii — and I might have shared this story before with you guys, but it wound up being one of those definitive stories in my life. When I was a kid at 14, and we were in Hawaii, we were evicted out of our little efficiency. We came home and it had a padlock on the door. I saw my mom crying — it was me and my mom — and she was tapped out. There was nothing we could do, padlock on the door. I just remember at that time thinking I never wanted this to happen again, so I wanted to become a success somehow so we’d never get locked out again and never get evicted. So in my mind at that time, at 14, the men who were successful were Stallone and Schwarzenegger and guys like that — Harrison Ford — who were these men of action. I was like, ‘Okay, they’re successful, they’re not getting evicted, they built their bodies — I’m gonna go build my body.’ It was like that.”

Has he watched Kellan Lutz’s Hercules? “Make me! [Laughs] No, I actually didn’t see it, no. Did you guys see it? You had to see it.”

[From Collider]

Hmm, the loincloth sounds promising. Did Kellan Lutz wear a loincloth as Hercules? Never mind, I really don’t need to know the answer to that question. Did The Rock just dis Kellan Lutz? Not really. Laughing is an involuntary reaction to the thought of Kellan Lutz as Hercules. As natural as sneezing. Was that a rude answer from Dwayne Johnson? I don’t know. I think it’s more of a rude question from the journo. They knew what answer they were looking for, and they got it. Besides, The Rock is used to dissing his opponents in the ring during his WWE adventures. The Rock would definitely give the people’s eyebrow to Kellan Lutz.

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet & WENN