We will confess to a certain weakness for the wax figure, as an artform. Few human endeavors, after all, tend to diverge as strongly between intent—i.e., looking like an actual famous person and not their much weirder, potentially dead sibling—and the actual, waxy result. So when a new Bad Wax Figurine arrives in the world, we feel moved to herald its birth.
Hello, Baby Wax Dwayne Johnson. Welcome to a world that will never love you.
This version of the Black Adam superstar was unveiled at the Musee Grevin in Paris this week, and pretty much instantly drew online commentary that we can only categorize as unkind. Some people took issue with its skin tone; others with the decision to depict him in rare Polo Shirt Dwayne mode. For us, it’s the smirk, which is off in ways that are hard to put into words, but which has somehow transformed from “biggest badass in the world has a secret” to “We just found our gym teacher’s corpse, and he’s weirdly happy about it.”
As is often the case with these excursions into the wax zone, the online reaction to the new figure sent us down a bit of a historical wormhole, hoping to see how other artists have fared with our man’s expressive eyebrows and surprisingly angular head. Won’t you join us, then, for a brief tour of the Wonderful World Of Wax Rocks?
Honestly, it’s not clear why we ever needed a second (or third, or fourth, etc.) wax Johnson, since Madame Tussauds basically nailed the look out the gate in 2002: Heavy on the eyebrow, plenty of swagger in the body language. It’s even approved by Flesh Johnson himself!
On the far, far side of the quality spectrum, we have the above entry from the Dreamland Wax Museum, exhibited in Brazil late last year. Dreamland tends to play fast and loose with faces anyways—take a gander at their godawful Ben Waxffleck—but we are genuinely not entirely convinced this isn’t a generic mannequin that has had a fake beard glued to it.
The best of the bunch, though, might be this one from 2019, which debuted at Madrid’s Museu de Cera. Look at that bad boy! He’s got the stubble, he’s got the furrowed brow, he’s even got a bit of light in his eyes. That’s a high-quality Wax Dwayne.
Okay, now look at this one again:
Yeah, woof.