Jelly Roll was Dwayne Johnson’s rock long before the musician was a bestselling recording artist.
While appearing on The Kelly Clarkson Show Friday (Nov. 15), The Rock opened up about discovering the “Need a Favor” singer’s music many years prior, during what the actor described as a rough patch in his life. “I was going through a hard time at that time — he didn’t even know it, because we didn’t know each other,” Johnson recalled.
“That was one of my bouts with depression, and I was struggling, and I was really wobbly,” he continued. “I was trying to balance a lot, we were pregnant with our second baby … my older daughter, she was long distance, I was trying to film a movie. There was a lot going on.”
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Johnson — who shares daughter Simone with his ex-wife, producer Dany Garcia, and daughters Jasmine and Tiana with musician Lauren Hashian, whom he married in 2019 — went on to read aloud a lyric of Jelly’s 2017 track “Only,” which the Moana star says particularly inspired him at the time.
“What if the darkness inside of me has finally taken my soul?/ What if the angels in heaven were sent to take me home?” Johnson quoted. “Would they fight through the demons that I have in my life?/ Lord, I’m believing eventually see the light.”
“That really moved me and touched me,” The Rock concluded. “We got in contact with each other and I told him what it meant to me. We didn’t know each other but became really good friends. That’s my boy, and I love that guy.”
As host Clarkson pointed out, the exchange occurred well before Jelly hit his commercial breakthrough in late 2022 with “Son of a Sinner” — which reached No. 31 on the Billboard Hot 100 — and sealed in his superstar status with 2023’s Whitsitt Chapel. The Tennessee native has since scored his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 with October’s Beautifully Broken, and he’s fresh off of nabbing two new Grammy nominations: best country song and best country solo performance for “I Am Not Okay.”
Jelly previously opened up on the Kelly Clarkson Show about his side of the story of his friendship with Johnson, a snippet of which the talk show played during the Jumanji actor’s episode. “He was a fan when I wasn’t worth being a fan of,” the musician says of The Rock in the clip. “By him being a fan, I was like, ‘If one of the greatest personalities of this generation — one of the greatest actors and entertainers — if he sees something in this music, maybe I’m on to something.’”
Watch Johnson gush about Jelly below.
