Aldis Hodge has been collecting major roles in Hollywood since 1995’s Die Hard With a Vengeance. Now 35, the actor has been especially visible recently thanks to impressive turns in films like Straight Outta Compton (2015), Hidden Figures (2016) and One Night in Miami (2020).
Hodge, though, didn’t believe it when Dwayne Johnson called to invite Hodge into the DC Extended Universe with a role as fan-favorite superhero Hawkman, aka Carter Hall — leader of the Justice Society of America — in The Rock’s grisly upcoming antihero action film Black Adam.
Hodge literally didn’t believe it. As in he thought someone was pranking him.
“I had auditioned and there was a couple weeks where there was radio silence so I thought that I didn’t get it,” Hodge told Yahoo Entertainment after the Warner Bros. Black Adam panel at San Diego Comic-Con over the weekend (watch above).
“And somebody had been playing on my phone, sending me really random messages like, ‘Hey, this is such-and-such.’ And then they would do it again. And then D.J. called, like, ‘Hey, this is D.J.’”
Hodge thought it sounded like The Rock, but still didn’t buy it.
“I’m like, ‘Bro, I’m done. I don’t have time. Stop f***ing around with my phone.’ I said some things. … I said, ‘Bro, stop playing with me!’ And he’s like, ‘No, for real, this is D.J.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, s**t. I messed up.’”
Even then, Hodge still thought Johnson was calling to say that the filmmakers were going with someone else.
“Wasn’t that,” he continues. “He said, ‘Welcome to Black Adam.’ I put the phone down for a minute, my mind exploded and I came back to Earth and picked the phone back up and I said, ‘Hoo! Thank you, brother, this is awesome, man.’
“[The film] means a lot to him but he also shared how much it means to him, how long he had been working on it, 10-plus years. … So that was pretty cool. But yeah, I almost hung up on him. I didn’t think it was him.”
— Video produced by Kyle Moss and edited by Jason Fitzpatrick
Black Adam open Oct. 21.
Watch the trailer:
