The Best Movies Featuring Wrestlers

The pageantry, the style and technique which has made wrestling a marquee entertainment product around the world has allowed its performers to develop skills which, on occasion, lead to success in other realms. Some wrestlers began as martial artists. Some had brief football careers. But quite a few of these amazing athletes selling scripted fights end up becoming stars on the silver screen, propelled by their popularity and stage presence. Sadly, many critically unacclaimed WWE-produced films gave them little help toward a prosperous film or television career. Sure, John Cena escaped The Marine films, but many of the actors in the sequels have had their careers constrained to those titles. Who knows how their careers would have blossomed? Cena has surpassed that series, but he’s hardly the first, the last or the most prominent.
You may find yourself getting to the end of this list wondering where all the women are. I have the same problem, but with the entertainment world. American wrestling has not yet afforded its female stars the same film opportunities it’s provided its men. I’ve already mentioned the Marine franchise swallowing WWE careers (Naomi is in The Marine 5: Battleground. Summer Rae is in The Marine 4: Moving Target). Chyna mostly played herself in brief TV appearances, had one-episode roles, or direct-to-video movies. Sasha Banks (credited by her real name, Mercedes Varnado) has been in two episodes of The Mandalorian and will hopefully be in more this coming year. Supu: Umarekawari no Monogatari features New Japan wrestler Kairi Sane, but I haven’t figured out how to watch that yet. (If you know where it’s streaming, please let me know.)
In the meantime, I’m looking forward to the continued success of those that have already crossed over, and the hopefully blossoming film careers of many of the sport’s emerging stars. The following is a chronological list of some of the best films (and one TV show) starring wrestlers, and some of their best performances.
Here are the best movies featuring wrestlers:
Rocky III (Hulk Hogan, Mr. T)
If you don’t count the Creed movies, Rocky III is probably the third or fourth best Rocky movie, and the second-best directed by Sylvester Stallone. It was originally included here because of Hulk Hogan’s brief appearance as Thunderlips, who fights Rocky at a charity event that gets way out of hand. But Mr. T is the main event in the film as antagonist and rival Clubber Lang. Stallone wrote the role for the famous bodyguard, who won the toughest bouncer competition and would take his success in this film to star in The A-Team. Lang is a menace, who beats Rocky in an early fight and gets his comeuppance later on. He’s also a great trash talker, which of course would help him later on. Aside from The A-Team T would end up at the first Wrestlemania, with Hogan as his tag-team partner; so Rocky III has got them coming and going: A wrestler on his way into acting, and an actor on his way into wrestling.
Predator (Jesse Ventura)
Predator is an inimitable sci-fi action horror film, the first in a long series with many sequel duds but which culminated in last year’s very good Prey. This 1987 film is known for its cast of ripped action heroes having to run to ground after their military commando hardware fails to be a match for an alien apex sport hunter with gadgets from outer space. Predator is also famous for having two members of its cast go on to govern U.S. states. One of those is, of course, the former Governator of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The other? Minnesota Reform Party’s own James George Janos AKA Jesse “The Body” Ventura. About 12 years before his election, but only a few months after Predator, Ventura would appear alongside Schwarzenegger again in the dystopian action movie The Running Man. He was a busy man. In Predator, Ventura plays Blain, who uses a machine gun nicknamed Old Painless, chews tobacco, spits on Dillon’s (Carl Weathers) shoes, has a close, maybe romantic relationship with Mac (Bill Duke) and dies a grizzly death. He pairs with Mac as a stoned-faced killer: Super serious, abrasive and the first off the board. Even with limited screentime, he’s a personality matching the size of his gun, blasting Little Richard out of a boombox on the helicopter that drops the commandos deep into the Central American forest for a rescue mission that turns into a race for their lives. “Ain’t got time to bleed,” indeed.
The Princess Bride (Andre the Giant)
There’s no more iconic strongman of the ring than Andre the Giant. He wrestled from 1966 when he was 19 years old until his untimely death at age 46 in 1993 and was the first person inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. Immortalized by Shepherd Fairey’s “Andre the Giant has a Posse” street art, which in turn became the template for the brand OBEY (which also draws from the following film on this list), Andre the Giant starred in of one of the most beloved fantasy films of the 1980s. In The Princess Bride, André René Roussimoff portrays Fezzik, henchman of Vizzini and later compatriot to the protagonist. Fezzik is a character of great violent potential, but also patient, soft-spoken and wise. Director Rob Reiner drew fantastic performances from the whole cast, not least of which stars Cary Elwes (Westley) and Robin Wright (Princess Buttercup). Of course, Andre the Giant’s performance as Fezzik is centered on and around his great size and strength. His utility to Vizzini in the kidnapping of Princess Buttercup (Wright) and carrying her—with Vizzini and Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin)—up The Cliffs of Insanity relies on his strength, but his friendship with Inigo rests on their shared wit and understanding, as well as the great compassion at Fezzik’s center. Andre’s unique voice, the thickly accented boom, is a complement throughout the film to his character’s role (including yelling to disperse crowds) and his face sells confusion and bemusement as well as wrath. He appears humble or unsophisticated at times, but never stupid. And he is, always, a captivating presence who makes a lot out of what could have been a nothing role in the hands of a lesser performer. Of course, as with many of these performances, the martial stage prowess of Andre the Giant comes into play when he first faces off against Westley.
They Live (Rowdy Roddy Piper)
A cult classic for the conspiracy-minded, nonconformists and generally discontent across the political spectrum, John Carpenter’s 1988 science fiction action satire starred the late Roderick George Toombs AKA “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. The Canadian who wrestled for the National Wrestling Alliance, the World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment) and World Championship Wrestling stars as a homeless drifter credited as “Nada” who—with the help of a hacker, a priest and a coworker he meets at a construction gig (Keith David)—discovers and fights a global conspiracy of alien infiltrators controlling humanity through advertising. These monsters have simple goals: Induce the mass production of cattle-like people to be worked to death and exploited for value. It’s a movie which explicitly features a shrinking middle class and police brutality toward the homeless. It’s uncannily prescient for a kooky sci-fi from the late 1980s because of the trajectory the U.S. has remained on in the intervening three and a half decades. It’s also a movie about the difficulty of getting your friends to face the truth of society, as depicted in a nearly seven-minute fight that comes from trying to get Frank (Keith David) to try on the truth-revealing sunglasses. It feels pulled right out of a wrestling match. Piper strikes an attractive figure here: Gruff but open-minded, generally a bit silly. He finds his surroundings remarkable from the first time we see him walking lazily by a train, taking stock of L.A. He has an air about him of trouble even though he tries to express a relaxed sensibility. He attracts trouble anyway, and the aggression with which he immediately confronts the aliens once he can see them shows a clear moral core and a simmering anger beneath the calm façade. While not the hulking physique of some of the wrestler-actors listed here, he’s no slouch either.