The Pain and the Passion That Fuel the Rock

If the world seemed a little bit sluggish this morning – if the birds weren’t singing as sweetly, or the sun hung a bit lower in the sky – it might be because Dwayne Johnson didn’t work out.

On any other day, Johnson would be up before dawn, clanging and banging on the 45,000 pounds of equipment in the torture chamber of a home gym he calls his Iron Paradise. But not today. Today Johnson slept in until the downright slothful hour of 6 a.m., in a hotel suite in Beverly Hills under the alias Sam Cooke, where he now sits perusing the newspaper while his longtime girlfriend, Lauren Hashian, enjoys a bowl of room-service granola.

The reason for this uncharacteristic idleness? Johnson and Hashian have a two-year-old daughter, Jasmine, and a second child arriving in a few weeks.

“We’re in the home stretch,” says Hashian, rubbing her belly – so they left the toddler with the nanny for the night and snuck off for a little romantic getaway. “We’re getting it in now before it’s too late.”

Johnson, padding around the suite in gym socks and a T-shirt that reads BLOOD SWEAT RESPECT, says he and Hashian were originally going to get married this spring in Hawaii. “But then we got pregnant,” he says. “And Mama don’t wanna take wedding pictures with a big belly – Mama wanna look good.”

They weren’t exactly trying to have another baby. “We were talking about it,” he says. “And then all of a sudden I get a text from her with a [picture of a] pregnancy test.” Apparently it didn’t take much. “All I did was look at her,” Johnson jokes. “Guess what. You’re pregnant. Baby in you now.”

“He just gave me the eyebrow,” says Hashian. “Pew. Here’s a baby.”

Johnson says he’s excited. “I had Simone when I was 29” – his older daughter, now 16, whom he had with his ex-wife, Dany Garcia, who’s now his manager. (They make it work.) “Guys don’t mature until much, much later, so it’s nice to be in my fourth level and have babies again.”

Fourth level – that’s a new one. Johnson, 45, grins. “It’s better than saying the actual number.” Continued at Rolling Stone