Dwayne Johnson choked up on a Disney stage Sunday, but not over movie franchises or box-office records. What moved him most, he told the crowd at D23’s Disney Legends ceremony, was watching his own daughters grow up around a company that shaped his childhood.
Johnson received the honor at the Honda Center in Anaheim, presented by “Jungle Cruise” and “The Smashing Machine” co-star Emily Blunt. Blunt recalled being caught off guard the first time they met. She had wrongly pictured him carrying the energy of “a walking suplex,” only to discover someone she described as wise, gentle and unpretentious once the wrestling persona fell away. She was quick to add that Johnson still keeps a rebellious streak beneath the warmth.
Accepting the award without a prepared script, Johnson spoke from memory rather than a teleprompter. He described taking his eldest daughter, Simone, to Disneyland when she was five, a period when he was still figuring out fatherhood and marriage in his twenties.
He recalled a princess at breakfast telling Simone to close her eyes and make a wish, a moment he said he has never forgotten. He also called out his younger daughters, Jasmine and Tiana, watching from home, and led the arena in a birthday singalong mid-speech. “It’s nice to be important,” he told the crowd, “but it’s more important to be nice.”
Johnson’s road to Anaheim ran through professional wrestling and a football career that collapsed when he was 23, leaving him, by his own account, down to his last seven dollars. He built the most successful run in wrestling history before pivoting to film, debuting in “The Mummy Returns” and breaking out as a lead in “The Scorpion King.” Since then he has appeared in over 40 films and become one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors, with a body of work that has pulled in over $15 billion at the global box office, including Disney’s “Moana” franchise, “Jungle Cruise” and “Race to Witch Mountain.”
He joined a 2026 Disney Legends class that also includes Bob Iger, Anne Hathaway, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jerry Bruckheimer, Chris Berman and the Jonas Brothers, continuing a tradition that closes out the biennial D23 convention with tributes to figures the company credits with shaping its legacy.
