Tonight’s episode of Young Rock centered around a young Dwayne Johnson making his in-ring debut for the WWF at a 1996 live event in Corpus Christi. The episode is loaded with portrayals of wrestling legends like Triple H, The Undertaker and Mick Foley and culminates in Johnson’s first-ever match with Steve Lombardi aka The Brooklyn Brawler. Wrestling fans will undoubtedly recognize the man playing the former jobber — All Elite Wrestling’s Colt Cabana. The former Ring of Honor star has been with AEW since 2020 and has spent the bulk of the last two years as a member of The Dark Order.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Chavo Guerrero, who helped train the actors for their in-ring matches as the show’s wrestling coordinator, broke the news that an AEW star would make a cameo back in March. He told Wrestling Inc. at the time, “It’s only beneficial to whatever company I end up at because the projects that I am working on are usually all wrestling projects. So I have the ability when they start casting, whatever organization I am working for, get their guys looked at. It’s a no-brainer. In fact, I don’t want to say who it is, because I don’t think I can talk about it yet. But for Young Rock season two, I helped cast a guy from AEW on it. I won’t say a name yet, but he played a great part and he was awesome. But that was a great working relationship, because I was like, ‘oh AEW, perfect.’ It works great.”
As for the future of Young Rock, executive producer Brian Gewirtz confirmed the show will tackle Johnson’s run in the WWE if the series gets picked up for a third season. He told ComicBook earlier this year, “Oh, definitely. We strategically put just a quick little second of a clip in there in the new trailer, kind of like Princess Leia in The Force Awakens trailer. We just wanted to give a quick, ‘Oh my God, what was that?’ moment of seeing Rocky Maivia making his grand entrance at Survivor Series ’96. We get to that and potentially more stuff this season without really giving anything away. Hopefully Season Three and beyond, at least in that timeline with Uli (Latukefu), we could really explore that. Uli, who plays 23-year-old Dwayne, he’s really just an athletic freak. He took to wrestling so quickly that if Vince [McMahon] wanted to take a look at him and bring him into WWE, I’m sure he would achieve success really quickly. I don’t think he’s going to do that. But if he wanted to, he probably could.”
