Deirdre Reynolds: ‘The modified waxworks looked even less like the actor’

The Paris museum faced accusations of ‘whitewashing’ earlier this month after unveiling its curiously light-skinned sculpture of Dwayne Johnson, who is of black Canadian and Samoan heritage.

In a video reposted by the Jumanji star on Monday, comedian James Andre Jefferson Jr joked: “They turned the Rock into a pebble. It look like The Rock ain't never seen the sun a day in his life.”

“They made The Rock look more like The Sourdough Loaf,” quipped another on Instagram.

After further drawing comparisons to everyone from Mr Clean to ‘Vin Diesel’s son’, the 51 year-old then asked the museum to make “important” changes to the replica - “starting with my skin colour.”

But I’m not sure bosses can blame “poor lighting”, as they had originally done, for the modified figure - which somehow managed to look even less like the actor after artists worked through the night to fix the boo-boo.

This week’s Halloween saw plenty of woedious impersonations as kids and big kids alike get into the Halloween spirit.

The laziest donned a pink mini dress and tie-dyed hoodie to channel Barbie and Ken, or a porkpie hat and pipe, and let on to be Oppenheimer.

There were also plenty of half-baked Little Mermaids, Elon Musks and Enoch and Ammi Burkes paying homage to some of the year’s biggest moments too.

Still, at least you don’t have to pay €26 - the cost of admission to the Grévin - to slam the front door on those.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness, as Oscar Wilde once said.

Although rapper Lil Wayne wasn’t convinced about the first, more oft-quoted part of that adage, when he called out the Hollywood Wax Museum on Monday over another waxwork gone wrong.

“Sorry wax museum but dat shit ain’t me!” he wrote on X upon seeing the LA attraction’s unfortunate effort at capturing his likeness. “You tried tho and I appreciate the effort.”

The look-unlike sadly isn’t even the worst professional attempt to immortalise a celebrity in wax.

Who could forget the now defunct Louis Tussauds House of Wax in Norfolk, dubbed the world’s worst wax museum, for its terrifying takes on everyone from the Beckhams to Prince William and Terry Wogan?

Or our own National Wax Museum which, in 2017, was forced to defend a new effigy of Conor McGregor from people who said it looked nothing like the MMA star.

Then again, in some of these cases, the waxwork may be less of a melt.