After a walkout sequence that included the sounds of Queen's "We Will Rock You," Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson gave viewers a concentrated dose of inspiration with his Generation Award acceptance speech at Monday night's MTV Movie & TV Awards ceremony.
"I wanna thank you, the people, the fans, I thank you . . . You are the reason are I'm getting this, so I wanna share a really quick lesson with you guys that I've learned over the years," Johnson told the gathered crowd of fans and fellow creators. "The most powerful thing that we can be is ourselves."
From there, Johnson looked back on his own foray into entertainment while affirming the importance of keeping one's curious inner child alive.
"We're still that little kid, right, just aspiring to be something better and aspiring to be important," he said. "When I first got to Hollywood, they didn't know what the hell to do with me . . . You think, oh, that's what I'm supposed to do and I was miserable doing that, so I made a choice. The choice was, I wasn't going to conform to Hollywood, Hollywood was going to conform to me."
Johnson's decision, of course, paid off and allowed him to be his "authentic self." However, Johnson cautioned, there's an even bigger picture to ponder.
"You gotta recognize the joy and the responsibility of bringing everybody with you," he said. "We bring everybody with us, and you do that by being kind, by being compassionate, by being inclusive, and straight-up just being good to people because that matters. And if you can hit that place, that's when you become powerful, that's when you become influential, that's when you can have real global influence in a positive way."
To close things out, Johnson recalled something he heard as a teenager that's stuck with him all these years. "It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice," he said accurately.
Next up, Johnson will be seen in the Fast & Furious spinoff Hobbs & Shaw.
