Free Guy: What Was Dwayne Johnson’s Cameo?

Ryan Reynolds’ Free Guy is packed to the brim with cameos and Easter Eggs, but who does his buddy Dwayne Johnson play in the film? Well, The Rock ends up running afoul of Guy during his days as a bank teller. Now, Johnson doesn’t actually appear in the flesh, but rather, his booming voice occupied one of the bank robbers. It’s a small moment, but fans obviously heard one of their favorite movie stars during the film. The Jungle Cruise star ended up being just one of the many cameos to pop up in the pandemic box office hit. Chris Evans, Hugh Jackman, and Channing Tatum also were along for the ride.

However, there is another source of inspiration from the Hobbs and Shaw star. Guy ends up clashing with another avatar molded after the people’s champion. Comicbook.com had the chance to speak with director Shawn Levy and Reynolds about the muscular bad guy.

“What we did was early on, we had this idea, Ryan and I. This character was not in the script, but we had this idea, what if Ryan has to fight Ryan? But what if it’s an upgrade? What if it’s Ryan 2.0? Taller, more muscular, more hairless, more streaks and tips hair, so we literally cast a bodybuilder out of LA,” Levy explained. “And his body was just sick and massive, and he made Ryan look like a fragile little feather.”

“So, we cast this dude, Aaron Reed, and Aaron did the whole movie with dots on his face. Those are tracking markers. Later then, we put Ryan in a motion capture device called the egg. It all sounds very futuristic,” he added. “We were like, “Ryan, enter the egg.” And it’s a machine where Ryan then did every line as Dude looking at lights in the motion capture egg, and then we digitally cut and morphed Ryan’s real face on Aaron’s body.”

Reynolds observed, “It really came to be just Shawn and I sitting in my apartment in New York and going, “We need something for Guy to fight, to physically fight against,” because the enemy in the real world is Taika Waititi’s character of Antoine, and we’re never going to face off, ‘so we have to find some anthropomorphic sized version of Taika’s character to fight.’ And that’s where we came up with Dude, which would just be an upgraded version of my character. And how do we upgrade him? We give him bright, white Chiclet teeth.”

Did you catch The Rock’s cameo in Free Guy? Let us know down in the comments!