Dwayne Johnson Details Relationship With Father

In a new trailer for his upcoming NBC comedy Young Rock, Dwayne Johnson detailed how growing up in a wrestling family heavily impacted who he is today.

“To understand me, you have to understand where I came from,” the wrestler-turned-actor says in the video.

Johnson recalls growing up in Hawaii where he was raised by his dad Rocky Johnson and mom Ata Johnson.

“To me, my dad was a superhero,” Johnson said of his late father, who was a world champion professional wrestler. “Sometimes, when you grow up around wrestlers, you learn lessons in very interesting ways.”

On Tuesday (February 2), during NBC’s TCA press tour, Johnson added about how his childhood was “incredibly tough.”

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“Growing up, and you know we specifically went with these timelines in my life that were very defining times at 10 years old, 15, and 18,” he said, according to PEOPLE. “There’s a lot of things in between those years that took place … but it was complicated, and the relationship that I had with my dad was incredibly complicated.”

Johnson revealed though that their relationship was “fueled by tough love,” stemming from his dad’s own childhood. “My dad was kicked out of his house at 13 and he was homeless, so that then shaped the man who then raised me,” he said. “And in that complication came an extraordinary life that was full of travel. I lived in 13 different states by the time I was 13 years old, also lived in New Zealand.”

On January 15, 2020, Rocky Johnson passed away. On the following Father’s Day, Dwayne opened up about how much he meant to him.

“Happy Father’s Day to this hardly ever smiling OG bad ass,” he wrote. “Little boys by nature, look up to and idolize their old man. They want to be just like em, do whatever they do and are always looking for their approval,”

He added in part: “Funny thing is the day I stopped looking for that approval was the day I understood what it meant to be man and more importantly, a father. That shift lifted me to a new level of gratitude for the tough love he always gave.”

Watch the new trailer for Young Rock below.