The first season of NBC’s Young Rock recapped Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s life during three crucial time periods — in 1982 while living in Hawaii just before his father was signed to the WWF, in 1987 as a high school student in Pennsylvania and in the 1990s while playing football at the University of Miami. Not much is known about what time periods Season 2 will feature (Johnson’s time in the Canadian Football League was teased in the season finale), but on Tuesday PWInsider‘s Mike Johnson reported the show will be casting even more actors to play famous 1980s wrestling icons.
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Famous wrestlers from Season 1 included Rocky Johnson (Joseph Lee Anderson) Andre The Giant (Matthew Willig), Iron Sheik (Brett Azar), Junkyard Dog (Nate Jackson), “Macho Man” Randy Savage (Kevin Makely), The Wild Samoans (Fasitua Amosa and John Tui), Sgt. Slaughter (Wayne Mattei) and Vince McMahon (Adam Ray). Johnson reported Season 2 will feature:
- Jerry Lawler
- Tommy Rich
- Bam Bam Bigelow
- Haystacks Calhoun
- Gene Okerlund
- Big John Studd
- Freddie Blassie
- Mr. Fuji
- The Great Kabuki
- Roddy Piper (recast from Season 1)
Brian Gewirtz, a former longtime WWE writer and executive producer for the show, spoke with ComicBook ahead of Season 1 about how the show went about casting the WWE Chairman.
“It was a lot of fun. Adam Ray is a very, very skilled comedian/actor and we hired him,” Gewirtz said. “He does a huge standup and I got to know down here and it was great putting him into Vince’s suit — circa-1982 Vince suits, of course. It’s an interesting time because Vince… He’s on the cusp of taking over but he hadn’t taken over yet. So he’s still working for his dad.”
He also explained why the showrunners chose to break up the show into multiple time periods across a season, saying, “When we first started conceiving [Young Rock], a lot of the brainstorming revolved around Dwayne telling stories of his life to our partners and the show creators, Nahnatchka Khan and Jeff Chang. The stories were so wild and so buried throughout his life.” As a result, the stories are also buried in the lives of the producers and their real stories have intertwined for years.
