Let’s Rock:
The Kiwi actress cast as Dwayne Johnson’s mum in Young Rock says the part has been life-changing for her. Chris Schulz reports.
The life-changing role for Dwayne Johnson.
When Stacey Leilua was asked to audition for Young Rock, she thought, “I can’t do that”.
The Kiwi actress had returned from three weeks of performing in New York and wanted to spend time at home with her daughter, who was about to start school.
Young Rock, NBC’s big-budget comedy show about Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s Samoan upbringing, would demand she move to America for a five-month shooting schedule.
“I was very much like, ‘I don’t want to go anywhere. I just want to work locally’,” says Leilua, a veteran actor of Samoan, M ori and New Zealand-European descent.
Her friends nagged her to try out for the role of Ata, Johnson’s Samoan mother, so she gave in and was flown to Los Angeles for a screen test. She won the role – and then Covid-19 hit.
“I was on this huge high with this life-changing thing,” the 39-year-old actor says. “All of a sudden there was this global pandemic.”
A month went by, then she got a call with good news – Young Rock’s set was moving to Brisbane.
That meant Leilua and the rest of the show’s Kiwi cast – including John Tui, Fasi Amosa, Emmett Skilton, Josh Thomson and Ana Tuisila – were required to spend two weeks in a managed isolation facility.
She says it was worth it – especially when she found a way for her family to visit her on set.
“The enormity of the project was never lost on us,” Leilua says. “You show up on set and there are hundreds of people there. Everyone’s like, ‘What do you need? What do you want? Here’s your trailer’.
“It’s just huge. I’ve never done anything like this before.”
Young Rock is set in both the past and the future.
It imagines one of the world’s most bankable movie
stars, famous as much for his wrestling persona as ‘The Rock’ as he is for movie franchises like Fast & Furious and Jumanji, as a presidential hopeful in 2032.
During an interview, he reminisces about his upbringing in Hawaii, sparking flashbacks featuring the cast of Kiwi stars.
Young Rock has had plenty of positive reviews since it debuted on NBC in February, with Indiewire praising the cast’s “distinct, vibrant personalities” and Collider calling it “must-see TV”.
Leilua has also been singled out for compliments, being called “quite magnetic” by a San Francisco Chronicle critic,who added,
“While everyone in Young Rock is pretty perfectly cast, her role, the least showy, is the most compelling surprise”. The experience has been full of plenty of other pinch-yourself moments for Leilua, who found herself on a gigantic billboard next to Johnson up on Hollywood Boulevard, received a Zoom call from Johnson and Ata, and was even followed by the star on Instagram. “He only follows 300 people in the world and to go, ‘One of them’s me, and he’s liking what I’m saying’, it’s just so bizarre,” she says. “It’s just ridiculous. It’s almost like I can’t even think about it. If you give it too much thought it would make you freak out.”