Here’s an offbeat little story for your Tuesday. There’s a wax museum in Paris called Musee Grevin that has a wax figure of allegedly Dwayne Johnson. I say “allegedly” because in a couple of significant ways, it does not look like him. There’s something off about his eyes and eyebrows–he looks a little mean. But the bigger problem is that the skin color of the wax figure is much lighter than The Rock is in real life. It’s conspicuous. I guess enough people complained about this on social media that Dwayne decided to respond. He wrote on Instagram that he’s reaching out to the wax museum so they can fix it. The museum claims they made the wax figure only from photo references. But still, they got his skin tone very wrong.

Dwayne Johnson has heard the complaints about his wax figure and says he’s doing something about it.

The Musée Grévin, a museum in Paris, France, that specializes in wax figures of famous people, came under fire recently for a sculpture of Johnson that many found to be too light skinned to represent the actor, who is multi-ethnic.

Some people took to social media to accuse the museum of “white washing” the figure of the “Black Adam” star, commenting that the recently unveiled likeness suffered from a “melanin deficiency.”

Johnson, whose late father, the wrestler Rocky Johnson, was of Black Nova Scotian descent and his mother, Ata Maivia, is Samoan, saw the outrage and addressed it Sunday on social media.

“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 wrote.

According to the museum’s site, “After Dwayne Johnson was chosen at the first edition of the Grévin Awards, sculptor Stéphane Barret had to rely on photos and videos to create a statue as close to reality as possible, without the presence of the international star.”

[From CNN]

Please tell me you guys can see what I’m talking about with the mean eyes. It creeps me out the longer I look at it. It’s giving “evil bouncer at seedy night club” which is not Dwayne’s vibe at all. I think the problem is that the angle of the figure’s left eyebrow is both too harsh, and too close to his actual eye. As for the issue of the figure’s skin color, I think it’s a lame excuse for the museum to say they got it wrong because the figure wasn’t created from life. I have never seen The Rock in any movie or photo where he looked like this. He does not look like this. Of course they can’t get an exact match going off of just photos and videos, but this is really off. It seems a lot like unconscious bias to me. I wonder what the fix is–do they airbrush paint onto the wax figure or do they have to start over again and make a whole new one? If nothing else, the old one would make for a terrific jump scare, placed in a window with harsh lighting for maximum spookiness (I would do this, by the way. I would put a wax figure in my window to scare away would-be intruders. Clearly I learned everything I know about home security from Kevin McCallister). But they really should re-do the whole thing and give him a more pleasant expression.

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