‘Young Rock’ Season 2 Trailer Includes His WWE Debut

Young Rock‘s second season is set to premiere on NBC on March 15, once again covering three time periods of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s life. As hinted in the season finale, the mid-90s era will include Johnson (played by Uli Latukefu) pivoting away from his football career and into the world of professional wrestling. The latest trailer for the series shows Latukefu telling his parents Rocky Johnson (Joseph Lee Anderson) and Ata Johnson (Stacey Leilua) that he wants to get into the family business. We then see flashes of Rocky training his son and right at the end of the trailer there’s a quick flash of him sporting his Rocky Maivia gear he debuted in with the World Wrestling Federation at Survivor Series 1996. 

Prior to signing with the WWF, Johnson wrestled for the United States Wrestling Association in Memphis as Flex Kavana from March to August ’96. Based on the casting calls for the season, the show will cover that time period as well.

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Brian Gewirtz, the show’s executive producer, spoke with ComicBook prior to the first season’s premiere and said the show wasn’t originally going to focus on Johnson’s wrestling career. So far, the show has primarily focussed on 1982, 1987 and Johnson’s collegiate years at the University of Miami in the 1990s.

“Well, when we first started conceiving the show, 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,” Gewirtz explained. “The stories were so wild and so buried throughout his life. It seems like if you’re putting all your cards into Little Dewey in 1982, you can somewhat tell that there’s always a possibility that you could eventually get there, but you never know with television. Stories of him in Bethlehem, and Memphis and the University of Miami and meeting all these iconic figures, it also blew up in some pretty dramatic [ways] for people in his life. It seemed like a much richer show and more complete to be able to extend to these three eras and still having a turn….like you just mentioned, a break in the WWE, there’s so many places for us to go as well.