Many wrestlers have gone on to become Hollywood stars – Source: Unsplash
It is perhaps not surprising that wrestlers make perfect movie stars. The grappling game is, in itself, a form of entertainment, with the wrestlers in tune with what is desired by an audience raised on the stories of good vs. bad, face vs. heel. Every bout is as much a show as it is a sporting spectacle.
Wrestling is a bruising business, however. So it is also not a huge shock to find wrestlers more than happy to swap the spandex pants for more regular outfits outside of the ring. Movie making may be tough – but it is nothing compared to facing 400-pound athletes in front of a sell-out crowd.
The route from wrestling to Hollywood is a well-trodden one. Athletes who once featured on the best online sportsbooks championship-winning markets are now more concerned with Oscar-winning betting odds. Here are some of the biggest names to successfully make the transition from wrestling to the silver screen.
Dwayne Johnson
Where else to start than with arguably the biggest movie star of the modern era? Now universally known as The Rock, Johnson followed his father into the ring after failing to turn a successful time in his college football career into a pro career. The NFL’s loss was wrestling’s gain, however, as The Rock became one of the stars of the Attitude Era.
Johnson ended his wrestling career as a 10-time world champion and made his first celluloid appearance in The Mummy Returns in 2001. Although many of his early roles played on his exceptional physique, Hollywood soon discovered he possessed real acting skill and incredible comic timing. He is now as well-loved by movie-goers as he was as a wrestler, and his films have taken around $15 billion at the box office.
John Cena
Dwayne Johnson is the wrestler-turned-movie-star that most current grapplers emulate these days – and the one who has recently taken a leap into the world of filmmaking is John Cena. He was even more successful than The Rock in the ring and is now adding a surprisingly wide-ranging array of acting roles to his resume.
The obvious action roles came first for Cena, but in recent years, he has appeared in a much more interesting selection of movies and TV shows. Cena is able to command the starring role in an offbeat superhero show like Peacemaker as well as exercise his comic chops in the multiple-award-winning drama, The Bear. There seems to be little this man cannot do.
Hulk Hogan
If it weren’t for this recently departed star of wrestling, it is arguable that we would not have had a John Cena or The Rock at all. For a while in the 1980s, Hogan kept wrestling afloat with his larger-than-life character, loved by millions. It was this crossover appeal that first propelled him onto the big screen, with a part in Rocky III in 1982.
Further roles came for Hulk Hogan in the years after, mostly of the over-the-top action comedy variety. Unfortunately, he didn’t really have the acting talent of The Rock of John Cena and films like Suburban Commando, supposed to kickstart a Hollywood career, didn’t do well. Later on, he capitalized on the public’s love of reality TV, but he will still go down as one of the biggest wrestling movie stars of all time.
Jesse Ventura
It is fair to say that this wrestler became known worldwide after his stint in the ring ended – although that might not necessarily be because of his foray onto the big screen. Jesse Ventura actually worked as a bodyguard for The Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead before moving into wrestling in the mid-1970s.
It was in 1981 that he and his then-tag team partner, Adrian Adonis, moved to the WWF, and became a regular in the ring throughout the 1980s. After retiring from the ring in 1991, Ventura moved into politics, shocking everyone by eventually becoming the governor of Minnesota. He had already landed roles in Predator and The Running Man in 1987 but mostly played himself in movies once he stopped wrestling.
Andre the Giant
Andre Roussimoff (better known as Andre the Giant) would have been the first to admit that he wasn’t the best actor out there. To be perfectly honest, his English wasn’t fantastic, but he was the absolutely obvious choice for a certain kind of role in a particular type of film. At 7ft4 and weighing over 500 pounds, he was literally a giant.
Roussimoff started wrestling in 1964, but it wasn’t until the 1980s and his move to the WWF that he became a global sensation. His popularity won him a number of bit parts in some of the biggest TV shows of the early 1980s, but his most memorable role has to be as, yes, a giant, in cult adventure classic, The Princess Bride.
Wrestlers are used to putting on a show and entertaining the crowd – Source: Pixabay
Dave Bautista
We round off with another grappler who is beginning to change perceptions of what a wrestler can do as an actor. He may have been a big name in the WWF from the turn of the century until 2019, but now he is a bona fide Hollywood film star.
Early roles tended to be playing himself or some kind of musclebound character with little personality needed. But the dry comedy shown as Drax in the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy forced directors to rethink the scope of his abilities. He may still feature in a lot of action movies but he has also been very successful in comedies and thrillers – and continues to appear in box office hits.
