It sounds like teenage Dwayne Johnson would have been on the run from his Red Notice character, FBI profiler John Hartley. Before he claimed the spotlight as a wrestling champ or basked in the flashing bulbs of the red carpet, Johnson says he preferred the shadows.

“We had a little theft ring when I was in Hawaii as a teenager,” he tells us. “I fractured a law or two. I was arrested a few times. So, in a way, my troubled teenage years helped me prepare for the role in Red Notice.”

It’s not quite what you’d expect from a man who’s made a career out of playing the good guy on screen. Ironically, Red Notice’s end twist even plays on that burnished image, cheekily subverting it in the final moments. “Dwayne has made a career of playing Johnny Law,” writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber says. “I thought there’s no chance the audience would think he’d play anything else. What’s been so rewarding and so fun is that anytime I would pitch the story to anybody, they wouldn’t see that coming.”

Johnson also opened up about his past brushes with the law in a November Vanity Fair profile, describing that he’d mostly steal clothes because, “I just didn’t want to wear the same old shorts and T-shirt and flip-flops every day.” On the way to the gym, he’d also sneak king-size Snickers bars from a 7-Eleven.

As for how he got away with it, Johnson tells us: “Like the great quote from Jurassic Park, ‘nature finds a way.’ Sometimes, bad guys find a way of doing things. And eventually, like all bad things, good catches up with it, and we got busted.”

The pivotal moment reportedly came in the fall of 1987, when he was arrested in Pennsylvania after stealing some warm clothes to get through the winter. That’s when Johnson realized that he had to start taking control of his future. “I started caring that night,” he told Vanity Fair. “I’ll never forget it.”