When you gaze into Dwayne Johnson's new wax figure, it gazes also into you
Or: A brief historical tour of frequently terrible wax sculptures of The Rock
We will confess to a certain weakness for the wax figure, as an artform. Few human endeavors, after all, tend to diverge as strongly between intent—i.e., looking like an actual famous person and not their much weirder, potentially dead sibling—and the actual, waxy result. So when a new Bad Wax Figurine arrives in the world, we feel moved to herald its birth.
Hello, Baby Wax Dwayne Johnson. Welcome to a world that will never love you.
This version of the Black Adam superstar was unveiled at the Musee Grevin in Paris this week, and pretty much instantly drew online commentary that we can only categorize as unkind. Some people took issue with its skin tone; others with the decision to depict him in rare Polo Shirt Dwayne mode. For us, it’s the smirk, which is off in ways that are hard to put into words, but which has somehow transformed from “biggest badass in the world has a secret” to “We just found our gym teacher’s corpse, and he’s weirdly happy about it.”
As is often the case with these excursions into the wax zone, the online reaction to the new figure sent us down a bit of a historical wormhole, hoping to see how other artists have fared with our man’s expressive eyebrows and surprisingly angular head. Won’t you join us, then, for a brief tour of the Wonderful World Of Wax Rocks?