“Nowadays you’re not going to be a movie star if you don’t have international appeal,” said Jeanine Basinger, the chair of the film studies department at Wesleyan University. “I love the Rock,” she added. “He’s got the kind of chops that people take for granted. He’s on a trajectory, and it’s upward. That’s called brains, hard work and a realistic view of the business.”

To hear Mr. Johnson tell it, this moment is the culmination of several years of fighting just to get Hollywood to accept him in all his rippling, jokey glory. The battle entailed switching his management team entirely and even negotiating a return to the WWE ring every now and then.

“I am going to take a crack at this,” he said of his A-list career goals, “and I have to be me, I have to be me.”

“Getting into Hollywood,” he added, “I learned that lesson the hard way.”

In 2004, after a sold-out match at Madison Square Garden, Mr. Johnson quietly walked away from wrestling, having made inroads into acting, with the support of Vince McMahon, the WWE impresario. It was Mr. McMahon who cajoled Lorne Michaels into letting the Rock, as he was then billed, host “S.N.L.” in 2000. Expectations were not high — he was still reciting a catchphrase (“Do you smell what the Rock is cooking?”) — but he thoroughly charmed. “He has a wonderful sense of timing, he has an innate theatricality and because he projects strength, the audience kind of relaxes with him,” Mr. Michaels said. “He could do nuance, he could do subtle, he could do big and broad.”