#and this brother song was in the trailer and had me howling even then cause of how shit it was

[dollopheadsandclotpoles]

Are people actually enjoying that “I always wanted a brother” song from Mufasa or are they being sarcastic? Cause that’s legit the worst musical song I’ve ever heard in my life

[uomo-accattivante]

On 21 August 2017, the Great American Eclipse caused a diagonal swathe of darkness to fall across the United States from Charleston, South Carolina on the East Coast to Lincoln City, Oregon on the West. In Manhattan, which was several hundred miles outside the path of totality, a gentle gloom fell over the city. Yet still office workers emptied out onto the pavements, wearing special paper glasses if they had been organised; holding up their phones and blinking nervously if they hadn’t. Despite promises that it was to be lit up for the occasion, there was no discernible twinkle from the Empire State Building; on Fifth Avenue, the darkened glass façade of Trump Tower grew a little dimmer. In Central Park Zoo, where children and tourists brandished pinhole cameras made from cereal boxes, Betty, a grizzly bear, seized the opportunity to take an unscrutinised dip.

Across the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Oscar Isaac, a 38-year-old Guatemalan-American actor and one of the profession’s most talented, dynamic and versatile recent prospects, was, like Betty, feeling too much in the sun. It was his day off from playing Hamlet in an acclaimed production at the Public Theater in Manhattan and he was at home on vocal rest. He kept a vague eye on the sky from the balcony of the one-bedroom apartment he shares — until their imminent move to a leafier part of Brooklyn — with his wife, the Danish documentary film-maker Elvira Lind, their Boston Terrier French Bulldog-cross Moby (also called a “Frenchton”, though not by him), and more recently, and to Moby’s initial consternation, their four-month-old son, Eugene.

Plus, he’s seen this kind of thing before. “I was in Guatemala in 1992 when there was a full solar eclipse,” he says the next day, sitting at a table in the restaurant of a fashionably austere hotel near his Williamsburg apartment, dressed in dark T-shirt and jeans and looking — amazingly, given his current theatrical and parental commitments — decidedly fresh. “The animals went crazy; across the whole city you could hear the dogs howling.” Isaac happened to be in Central America, he’ll mention later, because Hurricane Andrew had ripped the roof off the family home in Miami, Florida, while he and his mother, uncle, siblings and cousins huddled inside under couches and cushions. So yes, within the spectrum of Oscar Isaac’s experiences, the Great American Eclipse is no biggie.

Yet there is another upcoming celestial event that will have a reasonably significant impact on Isaac’s life. On 15 December, Star Wars: The Last Jedi will be released in cinemas, which, if you bought a ticket to Star Wars: The Force Awakens — and helped it gross more than $2bn worldwide — you’ll know is a pretty big deal. You’ll also know that Isaac plays Poe Dameron, a hunky, wise-cracking X-wing fighter pilot for the Resistance who became one of the most popular characters of writer-director JJ Abram’s reboot of the franchise thanks to Isaac’s charismatic performance and deadpan delivery (see his “Who talks first?” exchange with Vader-lite baddie Kylo Ren: one of the film’s only comedic beats).

And if you did see Star Wars: The Force Awakens you’ll know that, due to some major father-son conflict, there’s now an opening for a loveable, rogueish, leather-jacket-wearing hero… “Heeeeeh!” says Isaac, Fonzie-style, when I say as much. “Well, there could be, but I think what [The Last Jedi director] Rian [Johnson] did was make it less about filling a slot and more about what the story needs. The fact is now that the Resistance has been whittled to just a handful of people, they’re running for their lives, and Leia is grooming me — him — to be a leader of the Resistance, as opposed to a dashing, rogue hero.”

While he says he has “not that much more, but a little more to do” in this film, he can at least be assured he survives it; he starts filming Episode IX early next year.

If Poe seems like one of the new Star Wars firmament now — alongside John Boyega’s Finn, Daisy Ridley’s Rey and Poe’s spherical robot sidekick BB-8 — it’s only because Isaac willed it. Abrams had originally planned to kill Poe off, but when he met Isaac to discuss him taking the part, Isaac expressed some reservations. “I said that I wasn’t sure because I had already done that role in other movies where you kind of set it up for the main people and then you die spectacularly,” he remembers. “What’s funny is that [producer] Kathleen Kennedy was in the room and she was like, ‘Yeah, you did that for us in Bourne!’” (Sure enough, in 2012’s Bourne Legacy, Jeremy Renner’s character, Aaron Cross, steps out of an Alaskan log cabin while Isaac’s character, Outcome Agent 3, stays inside; a few seconds later the cabin is obliterated by a missile fired from a passing drone.)

This ability to back himself — judiciously and, one can imagine after meeting him, with no small amount of steely charm — seems to have served Isaac well so far. It’s what also saw him through the casting process for his breakthrough role in Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2014 film Inside Llewyn Davis, about a struggling folk singer in Sixties New York, partly based on the memoir of nearly-was musician Dave Van Ronk. Isaac, an accomplished musician himself, got wind that the Coens were casting and pestered his agent and manager to send over a tape, eventually landing himself an audition.

“I knew it was based on Dave Van Ronk and I looked nothing like him,” says Isaac. “He was a 6ft 5in, 300lb Swede and I was coming in there like… ‘Oh man.’” But then he noticed that the casting execs had with them a picture of the singer-songwriter Ray LaMontagne. “Suddenly, I got some confidence because he’s small and dark so I said to the casting director, ‘Oh cool, is that a reference?’ And they were like, 'No, he just came in here and he killed it.’” Isaac throws his head back and laughs. “They literally said, 'He killed it.’ It was so good!”

In the end it was Isaac who killed it in Inside Llewyn Davis, with a performance that was funny, sad, cantankerous and moving. The film was nominated for two Oscars and three Golden Globes, one of them for Isaac in the category of: “Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture — comedy or musical” (he lost to Leonardo DiCaprio for The Wolf of Wall Street). No cigar that time, but in 2016 he won a Golden Globe for his turn as a doomed mayor in David Simon’s HBO drama, Show Me a Hero. This year, and with peculiar hillbilly affectation, Vanity Fair proclaimed Isaac “the best dang actor of his generation”. It is not much of a stretch to imagine that, some day very soon, Isaac may become the first Oscar since Hammerstein to win the award whose name he shares. Certainly, the stars seem ready to align.

Of course, life stories do not run as neatly as all that and Isaac’s could have gone quite differently. He was born Óscar Isaac Hernández Estrada in Guatemala City, to which his father, Óscar, now a pulmonologist, had moved from Washington DC in order to attend medical school (having escaped to the States from Cuba just before the revolution) and where he met Isaac’s mother, Eugenia. Five months after Isaac was born, the family — also including an older sister, Nicole, and later joined by a younger brother, Michael — moved to America in order for Óscar Senior to complete his residencies: first to Baltimore, then New Orleans, eventually settling in Miami when Isaac was six.

Miami didn’t sit entirely right with him. “The Latin culture is so strong which was really nice,” he says, “but you had to drive everywhere, and it’s also strangely quite conservative. Money is valued, and nice cars and clothes, and what you look like, and that can get sort of tedious.” Still it was there, aged 11, that he took to the stage for the first time. The Christian middle school he attended put on performances in which the kids would mime to songs telling loosely biblical stories, including one in which Jesus and the Devil take part in a boxing match in heaven (note the word “loosely”). For that one, Isaac played the Devil. In another, he played Jesus calling Lazarus from the grave. “So yeah,” he laughs, “I’ve got the full range!’

He enjoyed the mixture of the attention and the “extreme nature of putting yourself out there in front of a bunch of people”, plus it gave him some release from stresses at home: his parents were separating and his mother became ill. His school failed to see these as sufficiently mitigating factors for Isaac’s subsequent wayward behaviour and, following an incident with a fire extinguisher, he was expelled. “It wasn’t that bad. They wanted me out of there. I was very happy to go.”

Following his parents’ divorce, he moved with his mother to Palm Beach, Florida, where he enrolled at a public high school. “It was glorious, I loved it,” says Isaac. “I loved it so much. I could walk to the beach every day, and go to this wild school where I became friends with so many different kinds of people. I met these guys who lived in the trailer parks in Boynton Beach and started a band, and my mom and my little brother would come and spy on me to see if I was doing drugs or anything, and I never was.”

Never?

“No, because I didn’t drink till I was, like, 24. Even though I stopped being religious, I liked the individuality of being the guy who didn’t do that stuff. Maybe it was the observer part of me… I liked being a little bit detached, and I wasn’t interested in doing something that was going to make me lose control.”

When he was 14, Isaac and his band-mates played at a talent show. They chose to perform 'Rape Me’ by Nirvana. “I remember singing to the parents, 'Rape meeee!’” Isaac laughs so hard he gives a little snort. “Yeah,” he says, composing himself again, “we didn’t win.” But something stuck and Isaac ended up being in a series of ska-punk outfits, first Paperface, then The Worms and later The Blinking Underdogs who, legend has it, would go on to support Green Day. “Supported… Ha! It was a festival…” says Isaac. “But hey, we played the same day, at the same festival, within a few hours of each other.” (On YouTube you can find a clip from 2001 of The Blinking Underdogs performing in a battle of the bands contest at somewhere called Spanky’s. Isaac is wearing a 'New York City’ T-shirt and brandishing a wine-coloured Flying V electric guitar.)

Still, Isaac’s path was uncertain. At one point he thought about joining the Marines. “The sax player in my band had grown up in a military family so we were like, 'Hey, let’s work out and get all ripped and be badasses!’” he says. “I was like, 'Yeah, I’ll do combat photography!’ My dad was really against it. He said, 'Clinton’s just going to make up a war for you guys to go to,’ so I had to have the recruiters come all the way down to Miami where my dad was living and they convinced him to let me join. I did the exam, I took the oath, but then we had gotten the money together to record an album with The Worms. I decided I’d join the Reserves instead. I said I wanted to do combat photography. They said, 'We don’t do that in the Reserves, but we can give you anti-tank?’ Ha! I was like, 'it’s a liiiiiittle different to what I was thinking…’”

Even when he started doing a few professional theatre gigs in Miami he was still toying with the idea of a music career, until one day, while in New York playing a young Fidel Castro in an off-Broadway production of Rogelio Martinez’s play, When it’s Cocktail Time in Cuba, he happened to pass by renowned performing arts school Juilliard. On a whim, he asked for an audition. He was told the deadline had passed. He insisted. They gave him a form. He filled it in and brought it back the next day. They post-dated it. He got in. And the rest is history. Only it wasn’t.

“In the second year they would do cuts,” Isaac says. “If you don’t do better they kick you out. All the acting teachers wanted me on probation, because they didn’t think I was trying hard enough.” Not for the first or last time, he held his ground. “It was just to spur me to do better I think, but I definitely argued.”

He stayed for the full course at Juilliard, though it was a challenge, not only because he’d relaxed his own non-drinking rule but also because he was maintaining a long-distance relationship with a girlfriend back in Florida. “For me, the twenties were the more difficult part of life. Four years is just… masochistic. We were a particularly close group but still, it’s really intense.” (Among his fellow students at the time were the actress Jessica Chastain, with whom he starred in the 2014 mob drama A Most Violent Year, and Sam Gold, his director in Hamlet.) He says he broadly kept it together: “I was never a mess, I just had a lot of confusion.” He got himself an agent in the graduation scrum, and soon started picking up work: a Law & Order here, a Shakespeare in the Park there; even, in 2006, a biblical story to rival his early efforts, playing Joseph in The Nativity Story (the first film to hold its premiere at the Vatican, no less).

By the time he enrolled at Juilliard he had already dropped “Hernández” and started going by Oscar Isaac, his two first given names. And for good reason. “When I was in Miami, there were a couple of other Oscar Hernándezes I would see at auditions. All [casting directors] would see me for was 'the gangster’ or whatever, so I was like, 'Well, let me see if this helps.’ I remember there was a casting director down there because [Men in Black director] Barry Sonnenfeld was doing a movie; she said, 'Let’s bring in this Oscar Isaac,’ and he was like, 'No no no! I just want Cubans!’ I saw Barry Sonnenfeld a couple of years ago and I told him that story — 'I don’t want a Jew, I want a Cuban!’”

Perhaps it’s a sad indictment of the entertainment industry that a Latino actor can’t expect a fair run at parts without erasing some of the ethnic signifiers in his own name, but on a personal basis at least, Isaac’s diverse role roster speaks to the canniness of his decision. He has played an English king in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood(2010), a Russian security guard in Madonna’s Edward-and-Mrs-Simpson drama W.E. (2011), an Armenian medical student in Terry George’s The Promise (2017) and — yes, Barry — a small, dark American Jew channelling a large blond Swede.

But then, of course, there are roles he’s played where ethnicity was all but irrelevant and talent was everything. Carey Mulligan’s ex-con husband Standard in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive in 2011 (another contender for his “spectacular deaths” series); mysterious technocrat Nathan Bateman in the beautifully poised sci-fi Ex Machina (2014) written and directed by Alex Garland (with whom he has also shot Annihilation — dashing between different sound stages at Pinewood while shooting The Last Jedi — which is due out next year). Or this month’s Suburbicon, a neat black comedy directed by George Clooney from an ancient Coen brothers script, in which Isaac cameos as a claims investigator looking into some dodgy paperwork filed by Julianne Moore and Matt Damon, and lights up every one of his brief scenes.

Isaac is a very modern kind of actor: one who shows range and versatility without being bland; who is handsome with his dark, intense eyes, heavy brows and thick curls, but not so freakishly handsome that it is distracting; who shows a casual disregard for the significance of celebrity and keeps his family, including his father, who remarried and had another son and daughter, close. It’s a testament to his skill that when he takes on a character, be it English royal or Greenwich Village pauper, it feels like — with the possible exception of Ray LaMontagne — it could never have been anyone else.

Today, though, he’s a Danish prince. To say that Isaac’s turn in Hamlet has caused a frenzy in New York would be something of an understatement. Certainly, it’s a sell-out. The Sunday before we meet, Al Pacino had been in. So scarce are tickets that Isaac’s own publicist says she’s unlikely to be able to get me one, and as soon as our interview is over I hightail it to the Public Theater to queue up to be put on the waiting list for returns for tonight’s performance. (I am seventh in line, and in my shameless desperation I tell the woman in front of me that I’ve flown over from London just to interview Isaac in the hope that she might let me jump the queue. She ponders it for a nanosecond, before another woman behind me starts talking about how her day job involves painting pictures of chimpanzees, and I lose the crowd.)

Clearly, Hamlet is occupying a great deal of Isaac’s available brain space right now, and not just the fact that he’s had to memorise approximately 1,500 lines. “Even tonight it’s different, what the play means to me,” he says. “It’s almost like a religious text, because it has the ambiguity of the Bible where you can look at one line and it can mean so many different things depending on how you meditate on it. Even when I have a night where I feel not particularly connected emotionally, it can still teach me. I’ll say a line and I’ll say, 'Ah, that’s good advice, Shakespeare, thank you.’”

Hamlet resonates with Isaac for reasons that he would never have foreseen or have wished for. While playing a young man mourning the untimely death of his father, Isaac was himself a young man mourning the untimely death of his mother, who died in February after an illness. Doing the play became a way to process his loss.

“It’s almost like this is the only framework where you can give expression to such intense emotions. Otherwise anywhere else is pretty inappropriate, unless you’re just in a room screaming to yourself,” he says. “This play is a beautiful morality tale about how to get through grief; to experience it every night for the last four months has definitely been cathartic but also educational; it has given structure to something that felt so overwhelming.”

In March, a month after Eugenia died, Isaac and Lind married, and then in April Eugene, named in remembrance of his late grandmother, was born. I ask Isaac about the shift in perspective that happens when you become a parent; whether he felt his own focus switch from being a son to being a father.

“It happened in a very dramatic way,” he says. “In a matter of three months my mother passed and my son was born, so that transition was very alive, to the point where I was telling my mom, 'I think you’re going to see him on the way out, tell him to listen to me as much as he can…’” He gives another laugh, but flat this time. “It was really tough because for me she was the only true example of unconditional love. It’s painful to know that that won’t exist for me anymore, other than me giving it to him. So now this isn’t happening” — he raises his arms towards the ceiling, gesturing a flow coming down towards him — “but now it goes this way” — he brings his arms down, making the same gesture, but flowing from him to the floor.

Does performing Hamlet, however pertinent its themes, ever feel like a way of refracting his own experiences, rather than feeling them in their rawest form?

“Yeah it is,” he says, “I’m sure when it’s over I don’t know how those things will live.” He pauses. “I’m a little bit… I don’t know if 'concerned’ is the right word, but as there’s only two weeks left of doing it, I’m curious to see what’s on the other end, when there’s no place to put it all.”

It’s a thoughtful, honest answer; one that doesn’t shy away from the emotional complexities of what he’s experiencing and is still to face, but admits to his own ignorance of what comes next. Because, although Isaac is clearly dedicated to his current lot, he has also suffered enough slings and arrows to know where self-determination has its limits.

What he does know is happening on the other end of Hamlet is “disconnection”, also known as a holiday, and he plans to travel with Lind to Maine where her documentary, Bobbi Jene, is screening at a film festival. Then he will fly to Buenos Aires for a couple of months filming Operation Finale, a drama about the 1960 Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann which Isaac is producing and in which he also stars as Mossad agent Peter Malkin, with Eichmann played by Sir Ben Kingsley. At some point after that he will get sucked into the vortex of promotion for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, of which today’s interview is an early glimmer.

But before that, he will unlock the immaculate black bicycle that he had chained up outside the hotel and disappear back into Brooklyn. Later, he will take the subway to Manhattan an hour-and-a-half or so before curtain. To get himself ready, and if the mood takes him, he will listen to Venezuelan musician Arca’s self-titled album or Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie and Lowell, light a candle, and look at a picture of his mother that he keeps in his dressing room.

Then, just before seven o'clock, he will make his way to the stage where, for the next four hours, he will make the packed house believe he is thinking Hamlet’s thoughts for the very first time, and strut around in his underpants feigning madness, and — for reasons that make a lot more sense if you’re there which, thanks to a last-minute phone-call from the office of someone whose name I never did catch, I was — stab a lasagna. And then at the end of Act V, when Hamlet lies dead, and as lightning staggers across the night sky outside the theatre, finally bringing the promised drama to the Manhattan skyline, the audience, as one, will rise.

Fashion by Allan Kennedy. Star Wars: The Last Jedi is out on 15 December. The December issue of Esquire is out now.

###

[hseasonpodcast]

Chapter 3 Summary:

In this episode, we bear witness to the trial of the century as Dwayne Johnson is prosecuted for the murder of Hornswoggle. Find out the verdict in this gripping courtroom drama.

Recorded in Arlington, VA with Alyssa Cowan (Arlington, VA / alyssapants.com / @alyssapants), Johnny Black (Washington, DC / @JohnnyOverthink), and Noah Crowley (Springfield, VA / @capitallaughsdc)

Episode Notes:

There’s no type writer in this episode, because I discovered that mine kicked the bucket on the last flight it was on. =/

Here’s a link to the Russell Madness trailer we were watching: youtube.com/watch?v=dVH9ULo4mzQ

We make a joke about there being an app that people use when the Wyatts come out. That’s because we were at a WWE even and Johnny thought it was an app, and one of us was like…”You know it’s just the flashlight on your phone?” So, we still make fun of him for that.

Johnny, Noah, and I enjoy going to Nova Pro Wrestling (@VAWrestling), and Cutie and Beast (@CATBwrestling) is one of the tag teams we really enjoy.

I used the music of Kevin MacLeod in this episode. You can find his work at incompetech.com.

If you like the podcast:

Follow us on Twitter (@hseasonpodcast). Chat about wrestling, or send in some suggestions for the story!

Like us on Facebook (facebook.com/HSeasonPodcast)

Hop on over to our Mad Lib review generator (bit.ly/2ff5nrV). You add the words, and it will email you a review and a link to post your review on iTunes.

Thanks for listening!

Love,

Alyssa

Chapter 3

The Rock calls the cops on Dwayne Johnson. It’s a very “Don’t shoot me, shoot him!” situation. He calls the cops on him for the murder of Hornswoggle and he tries to frame him.

Establishing shot: the set of Ballers. Helicopter shot over the set of Ballers. The wind howls on a grey day. Isn’t Ballers in Miami? It’s grey in Miami sometimes. Even in Miami, it’s grey sometimes. Is it always sunny in Miami? No, that’s Philadelphia. This is when we realize that Miami is the shadowform of Philadelphia.

Is Miami the good guy? No man, it’s just different forms of life. The UnderTaker, woops I mean Mark Calloway, has his own rich inner life. We meant to talk about Mark Calloway, so we’re clear.

Back to the story:

Rain drops swirl as the cops circle around Dwayne Johnson. He was filming a drug bust scene so he can’t tell the difference between real cops and fake cops, so he’s not taking anyone seriously. Paul Scheer is really hamming it up and is like jumping in front of the Rock and someone straight up shoots Paul Scheer. That cop removes his mask and it’s Rob Corddry, he was in riot gear. Rob Corddry was part of the real cops.

Smash cut to Dwayne Johnson in a cop car, finally taking it seriously.

Rob Corddry starts fading like they do in back to the future. He has to get Paul Scheer into the recombobulation chamber so they both don’t die. Rob didn’t realize that’s what happens if you kill your shadow, or did he? ‘Cause that’s we’re trying to figure out.

Once your shadow dies you have 24 hours to get them into the chamber (recombobluation) so you can be the only version of that thing/person/place. That’s why the Rock called the cops on Dwayne Johnson.

Hornswoggle was murdered at the Megaman Invitational, which took place at Billy Ocean’s house, so they have to have the trial at Billy Ocean’s house. That’s how the law works (It’s maritime law, /shrug). This is the trial of the Rock vs. the People of the Republic of Billy Ocean’s Maritime House. Billy Ocean, Judge Billy Ocean is presiding.

The prosecutor would obviously be very great, just the best, we have great people working for us. We find out that UnderTaker has reincarnated Macho Man Randy Savage. He’s the prosecutor. He’s a real good guy, an Atticus finch type lawyer. Good dude. UnderTaker reincarnating Macho Man sparks a big Twitter war with Donald Trump.

The Rock is getting nervous because his defense attorney isn’t showing up. He woops, we mean Dwayne Johnson’s attorney. I guess the Rock shouldn’t have an attorney here.

The prosecution calls its first witness to the stand. The Rock is sad that his defense attorney Bray Wyatt hasn’t shown up yet. The Rock wanted to get rid of the… Dwayne Johnson’s attorney, I mean. Also the rock wanted to fuck this sentence, what’s next?

First witness: Kendrick Lamar to the stand!

“State your name, playa.”

“Kendrick, ‘I like to rap’ Lamar. State your name.”

“Oh, Billy Ocean. Sassy, you are sassy and I like it. I’ll allow it,” says the judge.

Macho man says, “Oooh yeaaahhh. ”

“Yes!” screams Kendrick Lamar, “Say your name, what is your name?”

“Oooh yeah, Macho Man Randy Savage. I played Bone Saw in the Spiderman movies oh yea, and Kendrick Lamar I’ve got you for two minutes.”

Kendrick Lamar just starts clapping. He loves it. Then they lower a steel cage that traps Kendrick Lamar and Randy Savage. Man, maritime law, am I right?

“Bone Saw, Bone Saw!” screams Billy Ocean. Shoutout to Spiderman for keeping wrestling kayfabe.

“Oooh yeah, now I’m just a simple small down lawyer, but will you explain to these good people what happened during the Megaman Wrestling and Rap Invitational?

“Well, I was rapping, which is what I love to do.”

“Objection, let the record show I also love rapping, I have a whole rap album. It was a dis track against Hogan and other songs.”

Billy Ocean is like, ” I’ll allow it. It’s not an objection, but it is a fun fact.”

“The murder weapon was the Rock’s hands, he killed him with his own two hands.” Kendrick has video evidence.

They pull down a Titantron, and it lowers from the ceiling. Kendrick yells “Play, Goddamnit!”

It shows footage of the piledriver. The courtroom is aghast at the grisly footage. A resolute Macho Man says, “Oh yeah, nothing further, your honor.”

The lights go out suddenly! When they come back up, the UnderTaker appears in the cage and Billy Ocean is dumbfounded: “Nobody can get into the cage when it’s lowered, I’ll still allow it.”

“I think you wanted somebody else,” says the UnderTaker and the lights go down one more time. The lights come back up, and Sting is in the cage.

“Oooo show time,” yells Sting! Everyone pops, but they also know that’s still not the right person. Very smarky people in courtroom

“How are people still getting into this cage?” Billy Ocean’s mind is blown. He can’t figure out the tricks of wrestling.

The lights go back out again, and all the jury turns on their phone apps that make the lights and stuff, and Bray shuffles in.

“Sorry, it was really dark, I had to use this ladder to get into the cage.” When the lights turn on he’s trying to pull his rocking chair into the cage, but it’s stuck.

“Brothers and sisters, I am in darkness because I am not blinded by the light, this man is not the Rock, I can see into his soul.”

“That’s not really a question,” says Kendrick.

Bray pays no attention to Kendrick Lamar, and continues ranting about snakes, some lady named Abigail and the Donald Trump Twitter war.

Three hours later. Bray finally successfully pulls his chair trough the cage, and Billy Ocean is like, “Why didn’t we just lift the cage to bring in the chair?”

The whole time bray was ranting he was pulling on the chair. Bray says, “Nay Brother Ocean, I wanted to bring the chair through the cage to prove that nothing is impossible. The Rock switched with Dwayne, like I did with UnderTaker and Sting.”

The funniest horse is like, “More like ‘neigh brother'”

The whole jury is horses: Seabiscuit, Bojack Horseman, Carrie, Black Beauty, Seasbiscuit, Mr. Ed, and they all chuckle at the joke. Also Hornswoggle wearing a horse mask is on the jury. Also Hayden and Hornswoggle’s horse cousin, but they’re wearing the horse costume. For some reason they’re both wearing the bottom horse part of the costume.

“Look at this hung jury, naw mean? We’re hung like horses,” shouts seabiscuit 1 as he starts laugh crying.

Billy Ocean says, “I’ll allow it. It’s my party, but you’ll cry if you want to. I extend that over to everyone here. :)” Half the room breaks down in tears.

“We’ve been holding back that life is so sad,” they say.

“Prosecution call your next witness. ”

No! Swerve, the defense calls in Paul Scheer. Rob Cordroy brings in Paul Scheer in his backpack. He’s a busy guy on the go. But everybody thinks it’s Paul Scheer, just wearing a normal backpack. Bray is asking Paul Scheer to tell people something only the Dwayne Johnson would know, and not the Rock, but Paul Scheer can’t because it’s really Rob Corddry. Rob Corddry asks, “What is the Rock cooking?”

Dwayne is like, “Falafel?”

Gasps through the courtroom. Horses hate falafel. But they know he’s Dwayne now and not the Rock. Among the hubub Billy Ocean slams his gavel, and send the horse jury to the stable to render their verdict. They all have matching shirts, they rull cool.

By the way. The four horsemen are there too. We totally didn’t miss it. They’re all there, all the different iterations, and the four horsewomen. There are like 12 of them. 12 four horsemen.

The horse jury returns after exactly four hours, a lot of it was for the sandwich eating, they really just wanted sandwiches, they knew what was going to be the final verdict, but hey, free sandwiches. They declare the Rock not guilty, as Hornswoggle pulls off his horse mask. A hush falls over the crowd, “How can Hornswoggle be dead if he’s alive?” UnderTaker crawls up the wall into an air duct so as to not have to explain this situation, it’s just super complicated and he doesn’t want to have to deal with that shit. Just as he gets in the air duct his mom calls and the ringtone echoes throughout the courthouse, it’s the song “Mama Mia” by ABBA. Billy Ocean is like, “What the fuck? He’s not even dead? We just wasted our goddamn time!!!”

The Rock bursts into the courtroom, “Not True!!! He’s double not guilty, which makes him guilty!!” Billy Ocean is all like, “Ohhh shit man, that’s crazy. ”

So, Dwayne Johnson is heading to jail, and surprise, the road to WrestleMania is also a moving walkway. Like at an airport. A moving walkway is the shadow version of a road. So they’re there. WrestleMania.

Cut to Stone Cold. The camera pans up a little bit more and it’s not Stone Cold, it’s Cutie and the Beast!! Cutie is like, “Do you think we can do? We can make it to WrestleMania?”

And the Beast says, “Yes, ’cause we’re family, and the best tag team is family!!!­­”