The Rock’s wax figure gets update after backlash over skin colour

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Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s wax figure at the Grévin Museum in Paris has been given a makeover.

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After its unveiling last week, the sculpture drew ridicule online for its lighter skin colour and resemblance to all-purpose cleaner mascot Mr. Clean and Johnson’s Fast & Furious co-star Vin Diesel.

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Johnson took notice, re-sharing a video from comedian James Andre Jefferson Jr. in which the model was lambasted.

“You know Black ass Samoan The Rock? That’s how Paris thinks he looks,” Jefferson Jr. says in the video. “They turned The Rock into a pebble!… it looks like The Rock has never seen the sun a day in his life… You make the rock look like he David Beckham. It looks like The Rock is going to be a part of the royal family. Did y’all even Google him?”

Jefferson Jr. also made a joke about the backlash actress Halle Bailey faced as a Black actress portraying Ariel in the live-action Disney film earlier this year. “If this how y’all felt when you lost The Little Mermaid, I understand,” the comic joked.

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Johnson said he “legit belly laughed” at that observation.

“Knew my boy James Andre Jefferson Jr. had this Rock wax statue in his roasting crosshairs,” Johnson wrote in the caption of the video he re-posted to his 391 million followers. “For the record, I’m going to have my team reach out to our friends at Grevin Museum in Paris France so we can work at ‘updating’ my wax figure here with some important details and improvements — starting with my skin colour.”

Within 24 hours of Johnson’s public complaint, his figure was updated by artists who gave it a slightly darker skin tone.

“We found his reaction rather friendly when addressing the fact that his figure was indeed whiter than it should have been,” said Veronique Berecz, the museum’s head of PR told Variety.

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In a statement to the Sun, the Grévin Museum, which boasts 250 other celebrity figures in its collection, said Johnson’s criticisms were warranted.

“Dwayne Johnson is right, and we noticed it and will obviously remedy it as quickly as possible and send him new photos once completed,” public relations assistant Eugénie Outtier told the Sun, adding that they plan to toast his new figure with a glass of champagne when he’s next in the city.

Asked for her thoughts on accusations that the museum was “whitewashing” Johnson, Berecz told Variety it was an “honest mistake.”

“This has nothing to do with it — we just made an honest mistake based on the photos we looked at,” she said. “After we saw all these reactions on different blogs and social networks, we changed it immediately.”

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