The Highs and Lows of When Wrestlers Become Actors

The Smashing Machine is, so all of the press hype tells us, Dwayne Johnson’s chance to prove that he’s a real actor. After years of being an action star, whose range began and ended with ‘he’s The Rock’, he’s ready to stretch his muscles in a biopic of the MMA fighter Mark Kerr. He’s donned prosthetics, trained overtime, and gone through the process of ‘transforming’ himself into one of the first stars of the controversial sport. Reviews of his performance have been positive, which bodes well for what everyone expects to be the most full-on Oscar campaign of the season. The modern image of a leading man is largely shaped around Johnson. Now, he’s trying to show his range, arguably for the first time since Pain & Gain. There’s more to him than flexing, and hopefully, there’s more to him than the lion’s share of his small community: wrestlers turned actors.

Johnson has more than proved himself to Hollywood skeptics who questioned whether yet another wrestler could make the switch to acting and be more than a novelty. He’s certainly the most successful example of a mini cultural trend that’s helped to legitimize the WWE as a dominant entertainment force. Not many make the jump, but those who do garner a lot of attention and follow very similar paths to success (or lack thereof). But he did follow in some very large footsteps.

Hulk Hogan wasn’t the first wrestler to move into acting. Andre the Giant was a scene-stealing sweetheart in The Princess Bride and Rowdy Roddy Piper chewed bubblegum and kicked ass in John Carpenter’s They Live. With Hogan, he seemed to be the first instance of a wrestling conglomerate, the WWF, moulding one of its own stars for the big screen. The branding of wrestlers is not unlike a golden-age Hollywood studio crafting an image for its actors and building projects around that. His distinctive look and the rise of Hulkamania primed him for a strain of all-American Hollywood heroism. If only he could act. Then again, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a strongman turned thespian, was never prized for his range. He just needed to be big.

Hogan’s film career is best described as unintentionally entertaining. Films like No Holds Barred are camp in ways that he clearly never intended, while others, like Suburban Commando, feel like toy commercials without any products to plug. Hogan himself was the brand. It worked for a while before Hogan torpedoed it all. Sadly, the sex tape is not listed as one of his IMDb credits.

The first choice for a wrestler-turned-actor is usually an action role, where they can put that physicality to use and maybe be spared a ton of heavy dialogue to memorize. Johnson famously received a major payday for a glorified cameo in The Mummy Returns, where he didn’t speak a word and spent most of his scenes as a poorly CGI-d scorpion monster. Cena made his acting debut in The Marine, a role he was at least physically perfect for.

It’s hard to cast a wrestler, or any athlete, in so-called normal roles. It speaks to his intense star power that we spent decades allowing Schwarzenegger to play all-American suburban dads with that accent and that shoulder span. Shaquille O’Neal’s acting career was practically dead on arrival because it was so tough to cast a man that tall (well, that and his chops weren’t up to snuff). The world is certainly populated by physical behemoths who don’t play ball, but there’s a unique presence to an athlete that makes them feel anomalous in a crowd. This is especially true for wrestlers, whose careers are defined by personal branding and cults of personality. That can be hard to dent, and that’s assuming the actor/wrestler in question wants it to be.

Perhaps this is why it seems like literally every wrestler/athlete-turned-actor has to do a film where they play the tough dude taken down a peg by some sassy kids. Johnson donned wings and took orders from Julie Andrews in The Tooth Fairy. Hogan was Santa with Muscles and Mr. Nanny. Dave Bautista did My Spy. It’s a safe bet for such a performer, a way to mock the obvious, to puncture the persona without entirely losing it. The visual simplicity of it all — big guy versus tiny children — is the stuff of classic slapstick. Being able to laugh at yourself and make others laugh with you is a real performer’s skill.

Comedy in general is good for that. It’s certainly where John Cena has found his comfort zone. He has a propensity for goofiness that makes good use of his body, but he’s also able to downplay it. All it took for him to become a goofy dad in the underrated Blockers was the right pair of high-waisted trousers. Peacemaker works because it’s gung-ho but not po-faced. A lot of Johnson’s mega-star roles need that jolt of comedy to keep things apace, and to make him seem somewhat human as he displays near-invincible levels of strength. One of Johnson’s best roles, in Michael Bay’s overloaded and retina-burning satire Pain and Gain, is a canny display of his ability to balance both ego and embarrassment. There’s no fun in seeing the tough guy win over and over again.

For me, Dave Bautista is in a league of his own. For such a big guy (he has slimmed down substantially lately, in part so that he can take on more versatile roles), he’s been savvy in his film choices and willingness to push himself out of his comfort zone. James Gunn did good by him with his work in the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, which allowed him to flex his comedic muscles as much as his physical ones. It paved the way for the likes of Knock at the Cabin, where his foreboding presence offered an unnerving aura of peace in the face of absolute mayhem, and The Last Showgirl, as a man flung out of time and weighed down by his past mistakes (and wearing the ugliest mullet this side of Theo Von). He has something his contemporaries haven’t quite mastered: the ability to surprise.

Johnson is talented and capable of being more than he’s allowed himself to be. His ambition pushed him to a level of mega-stardom that very few celebrities reach. It’s that single-mindedness that makes him simultaneously fascinating and aggravating, both a sturdy brand and an increasingly less interesting performer. Perhaps he’ll learn good lessons from The Smashing Machine and take on more daring roles, ones where he can be weird or abrasive or, dare I say it, mundane. Such is the true challenge of an actor. Can you play a normal person? It’s harder than it looks. Dave Bautista can do it. Hulk Hogan never could. Can Dwayne fully and without hesitation stop being The Rock?