Update: 10/25/23 at 2:00 PM E.T.
After Johnson revealed that he reached out to the museum to rectify his wax statue, the museum is following through on the actor’s wishes.
“A week ago, we unveiled Dwayne Johnson’s waxwork and we got a big surprise when we put him under the lights. His skin tone seemed too pale,” managing director Yves Delhommeau said in French in a video shared via Instagram on Wednesday, October 25. “And we suddenly realized we might have got it wrong.”
Delhommeau added that the team of artists is going to continue to be working on improving Johnson’s statue.
Original story below:
Dwayne Johnson has some notes about how to improve his new wax figure for a Paris museum.
“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 color 🤣✊🏾💪🏾,” Johnson, 51, wrote via Instagram on Sunday, October 22, alongside a video of comedian James Andre Jefferson Jr. joking about the lookalike. “And next time I’m in Paris, I’ll stop in and have a drink with myself 🥃 😉.”
In the clip, Jefferson, 33, joked that the Musée Grévin turned the actor formerly known as The Rock into “a pebble” and that it looked like Johnson “had never seen the sun a day in his life.”
“I knew my boy @jamesjeffersonj had this Rock wax statue in his roasting crosshairs 😂💣🔥,” Johnson added. “‘Is this how y’all felt when you lost the Little Mermaid?’ 🤣 legit belly laughed at this ☝🏾.”
On Monday, October 23, the Musée Grévin told Deadline that it was going to fix the statue as soon as possible.
“Dwayne Johnson is right and we noticed it and will obviously remedy it as quickly as possible and send him new photos once completed,” the museum said in an email to Deadline. “We are waiting for him when he will come to Paris and the Grevin Wax Museum to celebrate that with a cup of champagne.”
The week before, the Parisian wax museum unveiled Johnson’s statue. Since its reveal, fans took to social media to comment on how it doesn’t resemble the action movie star drawing comparisons to others including Vin Diesel, Pitbull and Mr. Clean. Other critics also questioned the waxwork’s skin tone, as Johnson is of Samoan descent.
“They whitewashed the Rock,” tweeted one observer, while another fan joked, “I smell that the Rock is cooking without seasonings.”
The artists behind the wax figure created the statue based solely on photos and videos of Johnson, according to Musée Grévin’s website. Johnson’s intricate tattoos to the painters “10 days of painstaking work and a lot of research” on the Samoan-inspired body art.
“What was a little harder for me was the sample photo that was chosen, where he just had a very slight smile on his face, an expression that’s quite difficult to achieve. It was very subtle,” sculptor Stéphane Barret said on the website. “We worked on his face and eyes several times, because the most complicated thing about realism is getting the statue to come alive from the visitors’ perspective.”
