Why Hulk Hogan’s moviestardom imploded

With WrestleMania 39 kicking off April 1, and the new book from Polygon contributor Abraham Josephine Riesman Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Fall of America set to enter the ring on March 28, we spend the week wrestling with pro wrestling – and all that has shaped it.

Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea is one of the most recognizable cultural figures of all time, and not just because of the fame he achieved as the figurehead of the World Wrestling Federation in the second half of the 1980s. His iconic physical features during those heyday – the golden blonde hair and mustache, the hot dog color, the ketchup-and-mustard color scheme on his easy-to-tear shirts, the biceps and chest that made him a menace for doorways across America – are well established place in history as more mascot than human.

So when it came time to cash in on that fame in a series of movie roles that would take Hogan out of the squared circle and put him in front of Hollywood cameras, a grand experiment occurred. Could Hogan, the professional wrestler known for stirring up audiences and then dropping a meaty thigh on a downed opponent’s throat, translate his popularity to film? The answer would soon reveal itself in the resounding negative. Hogan was never quite meant for the red carpet, and the results of trying to put him there show the limits of translating a very specific character into another medium.

In a way, it was his first shot in film that proved to be the best exercise of his potential, one that took place a few years before he became professional wrestling’s most recognizable figurehead. In 1982, Hogan worked for the American Wrestling Association, first as a heel and then a beloved face, a representative of the evolution of pro wrestling as grand spectacles of heroes and villains took over any claim that the medium was a true athletic competition . Here he appeared Rock III, itself a film about glorious spectacle replacing previously hard-fought drama, as ‘Thunderlips’, a professional wrestler who faces the titular boxer in an exhibition match. It would be the biggest movie Hogan would ever star in, and perhaps it helped that it could cash in on some of Hogan’s best features without being forced to compete with him as a superstar.

In the film, Hogan is a clear outlier from normal human form – dwarfing a positively ripped Sylvester Stallone and throwing him through the ring with aplomb. For the most part, Hogan was given the standard pro-wrestling dialogue and insults, grunting with bared teeth and eventually being thrown out of the ring himself by Stallone. But he never lacks presence, a kind of charisma that means bowing to the back row, even on a movie screen. If you can get around the fact that his delivery is wooden at times, you can make Hogan happen.

Pro wrestling and Hollywood aren’t exactly strangers. Mr. T, who plays Stallone’s arch-rival Rock III, teamed up with Hogan in the main event of the first WrestleMania. And movie theaters today aren’t devoid of “sports entertainers” either – Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, John Cena and Dave Bautista, to name a few, have all made successful leaps into film careers. But they’ve all required a bit of finesse, a balancing act that means capitalizing on the inherent physicality and visceral appeal a wrestler offers with the finer points of narrative and character work. At their best, you get something like Johnson in them Fast Five or into Cena Peacekeeper or Bautista’s understated performance Knock on the hut.

At worst, you get someone like Hogan, who couldn’t transfer his particular brand of charisma from a ring to the screen. In the ring, Hogan was masterful. His movements were wide and outsized, making him an action figure in real life. And while history would reveal that his range of moves was quite limited, his expressions – all huge gestures of happiness, betrayal and (usually) triumph – made him a joy to watch, even if it played like camp. To make that into a movie character, you put a square peg in a round hole, and filmmakers tried again and again.

His first starring role was in 1989 No reservation, a film produced by the WWF that starred Hogan as a professional wrestler named Rip Thomas, with every facet of his persona based on Hulk’s. While it seems like it would play to Hogan’s strengths in the most obvious way, the film struggles in all directions. Hogan never really gets an emotion that tests him, and when he tries to deliver anything other than outrageous brutality, it feels out of place. The jokes, mostly youthful jokes that may appeal to children in the front row, are also disoriented.

It doesn’t help that the plot plays out like a couple of strung-together wrestling scenarios: a villainous man named Zeus wants to fight violently against Hogan, a man devoted to setting a good example for children. Zeus beats up Hogan’s little brother and now Hogan wants revenge. That revenge comes in a big event where Hogan emerges victorious. It’s all simple things that would satisfactorily culminate in a pay-per-view match at Madison Square Garden, but in a movie, an audience’s patience just runs out.

Zeus (played by actor “Tiny” Lister) would go on to wrestle in a few WWF matches, with the film’s promotion turning into a side career of sorts for the big man. Hogan, on the other hand, would see Hollywood working throughout the early ’90s, starring in movies and TV series such as Suburban Command, Mr Nanny, Thunder in paradise, The Secret Agent ClubAnd Santa With Muscles. Half of them are built around a single joke – Hulk Hogan is huge, so what if he did (insert soft household activities here)? The other half are standard adventure roles, with Hogan filling in all the muscular stereotypes the movies needed. They all play as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s abandoned vehicles (Suburban Command was actually), and Schwarzenegger had an ambitious charm that Hogan lacked.

With Hogan’s only notable performance was when he played himself in a short, loud cameo Gremlins 2: The New Party, it became clear that his push as a Hollywood attraction was doomed. It was a fall that coincided with Hogan’s in the pro wrestling world, as numbers of WWF events that had seen a blazing heat in the late ’80s had cooled by the mid-’90s. It wasn’t until Hogan reinvented himself as the villainous ‘Hollywood’ Hogan in World Championship Wrestling in 1996 that he would return to the limelight and a similar level of cultural fame.

Hogan was never a bad actor in the same way we usually define it. Bad acting usually shows up as a void on screen, taking the potential of a role and breaking it up painfully before our very eyes. It’s stilted and bland and monotonous. Hogan, on the other hand, had completely lost his aptitude for the arc of a WWF promo or big game in a 90 minute movie. In a match, the anguished expression of being on the receiving end of a body slam, or the climactic wave of the finger in an opponent’s face letting them know that Hogan and the 20,000 screaming Hulkamans in the stadium are de Heel’s bullshit more , logically. It’s Hogan in its purest form.

But Hogan doesn’t work if Hulk Hogan isn’t Hulk Hogan, even if, as we saw No reservation, he’s supposed to be pretty much Hulk Hogan. It’s more than a fish out of water – it speaks several languages ​​of performance. In Suburban Command, there is a scene where the character of Hulk (an intergalactic warrior who crash lands on Earth and befriends a family) is confused by the actions of a mime. As the mime pretends to be trapped in an invisible box, Hogan becomes worried and eventually knocks the mime to the ground in an attempt to break him out.

It’s a pretty succinct metaphor for Hogan’s entire acting career. Far from his home in the middle of a ring, he tried to struggle with a kind of performance that was completely foreign to him. There he applied his talents in the only way he really knew – in outsized, ill-fitting physicality and mannerisms. For better or worse, Hulk Hogan is best when he’s Hulk Hogan.