14 DAY TRIAL // If you’re a fan of the legend of Hercules, 2014 was an excellent year for that: first off, in January, we got “The Legend of Hercules” with Kellan Lutz as lead, and in July, “Hercules: The Thracian Wars” with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson will be released.
Just don’t ask The Rock what he thinks of Lutz’s film or if he’s seen it.
Collider did that and the wrestler turned box office king couldn’t stop laughing. “Make me! No, I actually didn’t see it, no. Did you guys see it? You had to see it,” he managed to say.
Though they’re both action stars, there is no way you can compare Lutz and The Rock and have the scales tip in Lutz’s favor, no matter how you look at it. The production value on “The Legend of Hercules” was considerably smaller than the one on Johnson’s movie, and it made it look like a big screen version of a low-budget Starz series.
So, if The Rock found it amusing to be asked if he’d seen Lutz’s film, he probably had every right to be so. Critics savaged it when it came out (it has a 3 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so it’s as “rotten” as it gets) and, what’s worse, audiences didn’t like it either.
Speaking of his own “Hercules” movie, Johnson stresses that a lot of work and consideration went into the making of it, starting from the many hours spent in the makeup chair to pre-production, the choreography of the fight scenes, and the dialog.
“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,” he tells Collider.
Many hours went into making him look like the legendary hero, he reveals. The beard alone, which was made of real yak hair and had to be stuck to his face strip by strip, took up to 3 hours to apply. A lot of time also went into hiding his many tattoos with body makeup – and only when this was out of the way could the regular working day begin.
In the same Collider interview, The Rock also goes a bit into what motivated him to bulk up and go into wrestling and he recalls a day when he was 14 that he and his mother were evicted from of their apartment for not paying rent.
He says that was the day when he promised himself he would never see his mom cry again for being poor and, since his role models at the time were Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, he started hitting the gym regularly to become as famous as they were.