JUNGLE CRUISE

STARS DWAYNE JOHNSON AND EMILY BLUNT TALK FAMILY, FAME, MAKING IT IN HOLLYWOOD THE HARD WAY AND THEIR NEW DISNEY MOVIE.

ho would fare better in a jungle, Dwayne Johnson or Emily Blunt?

“I would be OK,” Johnson says, then points his finger at Blunt, his co-star in the new action-packed summer movie Jungle Cruise .“You would struggle.”

But the actress is not having it. “You would be lost without your lip balm!” she says. “And you wouldn’t have your soap. He’s the cleanest human being alive. He needs to shower about five times a day.”

Johnson, 49, and Blunt, 38—two A-list stars who can nimbly move across action, comedy and even musicals—learned a lot about each other when they paired up, for the first time, in Jungle Cruise (in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access July 30), the latest action-adventure-comedy inspired by a classic Disney attraction. The storyline follows riverboat captain Frank ( Johnson) as he takes a gung-ho scientist, Lily (Blunt), on a mission deep into an Amazonian jungle, where they hope to find the legendary Tree of Life. Along the way, they run into vicious animals, ancient curses— and a bunch of Nazis trying to beat them to the prize.

Though it’s based, at least in name, on the 66-year-old Disneyland ride, the pair say the film is more akin to some of their all-time favorite adventure movies, such as the 1951 Bogart and

WHepburn classic The African Queen, 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark and 1984’s Romancing the Stone. “I think people have tried to emulate those movies with very little success, but when I read this script, it felt reminiscent in a very loyal way,” Blunt says. “It really pierced my heart. It’s romantic, a roller coaster of liberated adventure.”

Hawaii’s island of Kauai served as the backdrop for the Amazon, and Blunt notes that real snakes were used in some scenes. “The jaguar is [computer-animated], which was good, because Dwayne is scared of animals,” she jokes. Johnson adds that production was a joy because art reflected life. “The arguments that ensue in the movie, you realize that one character is generally right and one is generally wrong.” He playfully pats Blunt’s knee.

Watching their banter during an interview in Atlanta in February 2020 (the movie was delayed during the pandemic), it’s hard to believe the pair had never met prior to signing on. As they sit next to each other in a room inside the Tyler Perry Studios compound, one star can barely get through a sentence without the other chiming in. Fourteen months later, during a joint video call—with Johnson back in Atlanta to shoot the 2022 superhero flick Black Adam and Blunt, shortly before the premiere of her horror movie A Quiet Place Part II, in Spain for

production of the Amazon/BBC Western series The English—the two pick up right where they left off. “I’m sorry I’m late. I was on the wrong Zoom and got confused!” she explains, to which he replies, “We’ve been singing your praises!” Pause. “Actually, no, we haven’t.”

HELLO, HOLLYWOOD

Neither took the easy route to Hollywood. Johnson is the son of Rocky Johnson, a pioneering wrestler, and Ata Maivia, who has ties to a legendary clan of Samoan wrestlers. Despite the rich legacy, he grew up poor as he and his family bounced around several states and New Zealand. But even as kid, he says, “I was fairly confident; I used to think I was a combination of Elvis Presley, Bruce Lee, Richard Pryor and Harrison Ford.”

He played football at the University of Miami and earned a degree in criminology with the notion of joining the FBI. “I had a great professor in college,” he says. “He told me that I would be great as an agent in the field and wanted me to go to law school. But my grades weren’t good enough.” Joining the NFL was out too, due to injuries. He decided to try professional wrestling, because, he says flatly, “it was a pathway to not being broke.”

Originally billed as “Rocky Maivia” and then “The Rock,” Johnson entertained soldout crowds with his charismatic bravado (and raised eyebrow) as a WWF and WWE superstar from 1996 to 2004. His popularity earned him the chance to play the villain in the 2001 sci-fi adventure flick The Mummy Returns. That’s when the thenfather-to-be (his oldest daughter, Simone, was born in August 2001) had an epiphany while filming in a Moroccan desert.

“I loved acting,” he says. “I realized, ‘Oh, wow, I could make money from this and take care of my family. I don’t have to beat up my body as much.’ And not only that, I stepped into a culture where everyone worked hard to ensure you could deliver the performance; there was camaraderie. [Wrestling] was like kill or be killed, because you were on your own.”

Johnson never became an FBI field agent, but, as a $10 billion–grossing boxoffice behemoth in Hollywood, he became one of the world’s most recognizable “good guys.” He’s rescued people from earthquakes (San Andreas), inferno buildings (Skyscraper), mutated animals (Rampage) and drowning in the ocean (Baywatch— which he boasts received a Razzie Award for a movie “So Rotten You Loved It”). He’s also appeared as a sports agent in HBO’s Ballers and has an NBC sitcom, Young Rock, based on his life.

Across the pond, Blunt grew up in southwest London in a middle-class household with three siblings. Her barrister dad, Oliver, “was famous for bringing home really inappropriate films for us to watch when we were young,” she says. “I saw Pretty Woman when I was 12 and loved it!” She was especially taken by the scene in the classic thriller Jaws when Robert Shaw’s character gives his iconic monologue about the World War II disaster that befell his

fellow seamen. “I started really getting interested in performance and the subtleties,” she says. (She rewatched it during quarantine.)

She hustled for a catering company and intended to attend university in 2001. “I was going to study Spanish and wanted to be an interpreter for the UN,” she says. But she put that off because of a pinch-me opportunity: a supporting role opposite Judi Dench in the West End play The Royal Family. She was 18. “I feel like I entered the industry in a pretty casual way,” she says. “I just thought I’d give it a go. I figured I didn’t have to wait tables anymore.”

And off she went. Blunt appeared in more plays and several art-house movies before her Golden Globe–nominated performance in The Devil Wears Prada. “After that, I was offered every single acerbic British person [role] on planet Earth,” she says. “I knew I had to break the mold, otherwise I’d be pigeonholed as being this horrible person all the time.” She’s since racked up credits in such diverse projects as Sicario, Into the Woods, The Girl on the Train and A Quiet Place. She costarred with her director-actor husband, John Krasinki, in the latter. “People asked if we had fun,” she says of the nail-biting, adrenaline-pumping thriller. “No! What an intense world.” The acclaimed sequel recently grossed $57 million in its opening weekend after a yearlong COVID-affected delay.

Johnson and Blunt relish their own quiet places with their families, though things were decidedly less quiet during