On May 2, 2011, President Barack Obama announced to the world that Osama bin Laden was dead—more than an hour after Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson had already shared the news. “Just got word that will shock the world,” the wrestler-turned-movie star wrote on Twitter at 10:24 p.m., a full 71 minutes before Obama addressed the public at 11:35 p.m. Speaking about the incident during a live recording of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, Johnson shed some light on the “oh s---” moment. The 53-year-old star said that a “friend of a friend” shared the news with him and told him then-President Obama would be announcing it in about 20 minutes. “Twenty minutes go by, and at about the 25th minute, I tweet this,” Johnson told the audience. “Then I get a second call, and the call is, ‘Yeah, the president didn’t go on yet.’ And I went, ‘Oh s---.’” In truth, both Johnson and Obama were beaten to the punch by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff Keith Urbahn, who tweeted a more specific summary of events four minutes before The Rock’s hinting suggestion. Johnson was speaking to an audience of film students at Chapman University in Orange, California, to promote his latest movie, The Smashing Machine.
Read it at The Hollywood Reporter
