New barnet: why is everyone wigging out over Dwayne Johnson’s Moana hairpiece?

The live-action remake of Disney’s hit animation is out this Friday and meme-makers have been speaking bald truths about The Rock’s nylon mop

Disney’s new live-action Moana remake might not have a lot to recommend it – like so many of its ilk it carries a creepy unreality that makes the whole thing look like a liminal ChatGPT hallucination – but it does boast one element that may very well carry it towards the gates of immortality. I am, of course, talking about Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s wig.

Some context. The biggest draw of the live-action Moana is that Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson reprises his role from the original, as the egotistical shapeshifting demigod Maui. And this presented something of a problem. You see, Maui is characterised by many things – his tattoos, his exuberance – but none more so than his hair. Maui has the long and flowing hair of a being unencumbered by the onset of male pattern baldness. The hair is where Maui gets most of his personality. It makes him the personified spirit of virility itself.

Meanwhile, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is bald. This isn’t a secret, because he is one of the most immediately recognisable men on the planet, and much of this is down to his visible scalp. His most iconic characters – Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in the Fast & Furious movies, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in Baywatch, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in Jumanji – have all been bald. And this is not something he is mocked for; partly because society has progressed enough not to shame men for something they have no control over, and partly because Johnson would scrunch you into a ball and kick you into the Sun if you ever tried.

How to reconcile these two diametrically opposed truths? The answer, obviously, was to put Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in a wig. Which would have been fine, except the internet has responded with the same level of amused horror that it would if Sir David Attenborough was caught bare-knuckle boxing a swan.

The memes have been relentless. According to them, Johnson’s wig looks like it is “fighting gravity, the wind, and its own contract obligations”. It looks like “a shake-n-go wig from Spirit Halloween”. It “deserves its own credit in the movie”. To his credit, Johnson has taken the mockery in his stride, telling a red carpet reporter that the memes made him laugh “so fucking hard”. Nevertheless, let’s dig into this a little.

Because this isn’t the first time that Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson has sported a wig on film. In the last movie he released, in fact – 2025’s The Smashing Machine – he wore one, a perfectly acceptable replica of the actual haircut worn by the real life Mark Kerr. Did anyone mock him for that? No they did not. Now, this might be because his entire appearance was so warped by prosthetics – making his whole head look like a sun-damaged watermelon-sized waxwork testicle – that his rug was the last thing that anybody noticed about him. But still, the point remains that he got away with it.

And let’s not forget 2001’s The Mummy Returns, in which he also wore a vast and elaborate wig. Why no memes then? Could it be that Johnson still had hair of his own then, albeit hair that had been confined to a tiny little yarmulke balanced daintily on the top of his head? Could it be that the wig for that movie had a heft and density that, unlike the Moana wig, suggested that it might have grown from his own head? Or was it that The Mummy Returns contained a sequence of such notoriously botched CGI that people deliberately wiped the whole film from their memories to protect their sanity? Maybe the answer is all of them.

So, no, the problem isn’t that Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson wears wigs. It is that Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson wore this specific wig for this specific role. There is something nastily artificial about his Maui wig. It looks like it was made from nylon and bought out of a bucket from a stall in a weekday high street market. It looks like it itches. More than anything, it looks like it requires the sort of constant maintenance – brushing, conditioning, perming – that Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson simply doesn’t seem as if he has the time or effort to apply. It’s an alien being. No wonder everyone is freaked out.

Nevertheless, there’s every chance that Moana will defy critical expectations and succeed financially, upon which Disney will rush to make a live action version of Moana 2. And when it does, for the sake of the internet, may we all do the decent thing and pray for a bald Maui.