Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson reacts to rugby league clips as he previews latest film

One thing you probably didn’t expect to see today is ‘The Rock’ Dwayne Johnson watching rugby league.

Well, it’s happened, with one of the world’s most famous actors sitting down to react to a couple of big moments from the 2022 NRL season.

The Rock was being intereview by NRL Women’s player Kennedy Cherrington and Johnny Tuivasa-Sheck, the brother of former Kiwis captain Roger, to talk about his latest movie Black Adam.

As part of the preview for Johnson’s latest film, the hosts had the 50-year-old predict what would happen from a couple of clips from last season’s NRL action, including moments from both the mens and women’s game.

It comes after reports ‘The Rock’ could become of the face of rugby league in America with the NRL confirming plans yesterday of wanting to take the competition to the United States.

Johnson, who is of Samoan heritage, is close friends of multi-millionaire businessman and NRL fan Paul Langi Kinikini who has pitched for a game to be staged in Salt Lake City, Utah due to its large Polynesian population.

Kinikini is a big rugby league fan of Tongan heritage and is keen on using his close friend Johnson as the poster boy, with him being one of the most famous faces on the planet with an Instagram following of over 200 million.

NRL boss Peter V’landys confirmed to the Telegraph yesterday that he wants to take the competition to America as soon as next year.

“America is certainly a market for us,” said V’Landys. “It’s a big revenue growth for us and one thing we learnt with broadcasting is we are so small scale.

“We have 25 million people in Australia. There are 40 million in California alone. We need to make the NRL bigger scale. We need to have the ambition to grow the game in huge markets and the beauty of technology today is the NRL can have a presence anywhere in the world.

“We need a long-term strategy. We want to take an NRL game over to America to show them how good rugby league is. Even if you start off picking up 10,000 customers, eventually it can multiply.

“In 2023, we’d like an NRL game in America and hopefully more games down the track.”