Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was recently thrust into controversy, thanks to a wax statue that was supposed to be made in his likeness – but completely missed the mark. The famous Grevin Museum in Paris, France, recently unveiled a wax statue figure of The Rock that quickly viral – most notably because of the fact that Johnson’s skin tone was whitened to an offensive degree.
After many fans of The Rock chastized the museum, the story went viral on social media – until it finally got on the radar of Dwayne Johnson himself. The Rock shared his thoughts on the matter in an Instagram post days later, and said the following:
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For the record, I’m going to have my team reach out to our friends at Grevin Museum, in Paris France 🇫🇷 so we can work at “updating” my wax figure here with some important details and improvements- starting with my skin color 🤣✊🏾💪🏾 And next time I’m in Paris, I’ll stop in and have a drink with myself 🥃 😉
Now the Grevin Musuem has responded to the controversy over their Dwayne ‘The White’ Johnson wax figure, and are making an official statement:
“We found his reaction rather friendly when addressing the fact that his figure was indeed whiter than it should have been,” said Veronique Berecz, head of PR for the Grevin Museum. “Unfortunately, we didn’t get to meet Dwayne Johnson so we used several photos — but as it turns out, pictures can be very tricky because the nuances of skin tones can differ depending on the lighting on photos,” she added. “Every time, the sculptor has to determine the exact face and body shapes, the volumes and it’s always a very complicated challenge if we haven’t met the person… we just made an honest mistake based on the photos we looked at,” she continued. “After we saw all these reactions on different blogs and social networks, we changed it immediately.”
The diffculties of making of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s wax statue apparently went well beyond the skin tone: the body mass of the wrestler-turned-actor was also a pretty big problem:
“We conducted a casting of models based on his body measurements, and that wasn’t a small undertaking because we had to find a man who had roughly the same body type as Dwayne Johnson — a height of 6’5″ with those huge muscles — and we found our model in a bodybuilding club!” Berecz explained.
Dwayne Johnson has, as Berecz said, been “friendly” with is response to the incident, and it looks like the matter is now closed.
