Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson was driving when he found out about Paul Walker's death.

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Johnson explained what he felt when he got the news.

"I pulled over and looked at my messages and had a moment where I just caught my breath," he said. Johnson had been driving with his girlfriend Lauren Hashian, 29, in Florida. "We said a prayer right then to give his daughter (Meadow) strength -- because we had talked about our daughters."

Johnson said they also bonded through being divorced and talked about how important a connection between a father and daughter is.

"Then once we got home, we started bawling," he said. "He was a beautiful man, and in that crazy world, that's really something."

Johnson has a 12-year-old daughter, Simone, with ex-wife and manager Dany Garcia.

And though he may be successful now, things weren't always so easy. He struggled with depression and was upset at his father for being absent. At one school in Nashville, he didn't even have friends because he had reached his full height; the other students thought he was an undercover cop.

Another time he and his mother were living in an efficiency that cost $120 a week, and when they came home, there was a padlock and an eviction notice. A week before, his mother's car had been repossessed. And he wasn't making it better by getting in with a bad crowd.

While his mother tried to find a new job so that they'd have a new home, Johnson decided to make a change in his life.

"That was the tipping point," he says. "It was about, 'What can I control with these two hands?' The only thing I could do was train and build my body. The successful men I knew were men who built their bodies."

He had a few more missteps, but ended up following in his father and grandfather's footsteps by going into wrestling, where he had many things to learn to become successful.

The latest issues of The Hollywood Reporter goes on sale on June 27.