8 Movie & TV Characters Based Off Wrestling Personalities
Professional wrestling is one of the most creative outlets in the entertainment world. Promoters, talent, and other personalities have to constantly refine characters and storylines and plan entire shows, sometimes more than one, every week. Because of decades of wrestling history and the amount of intricate and captivating characters the industry has produced, filmmakers and TV show creators often draw inspiration from professional wrestling when developing their own characters.
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Most fans of professional wrestling are well aware that the opposite is true as well. Many wrestlers, including Sting (The Crow), Tyler Breeze (Zoolander), Orange Cassidy (Wet Hot American Summer), Paul Burchill (Pirates of the Caribbean), and Razor Ramon (Scarface) based their gimmick off of popular film characters. These film and TV characters, however, either borrowed elements from or based their entire character off of real-life professional wrestlers.
8 Ashley Schaeffer - Eastbound & Down (Ric Flair)
Will Ferrell is one of the best comedy actors of his generation and has become synonymous with comedy sports films, i.e. Blades of Glory, Talladega Nights, and Semi Pro. He would undeniably be fantastic as the lead in a wrestling comedy. If you're not convinced, go back and look at his performance as Ashley Schaeffer in the HBO series Eastbound & Down.
Ferrell's portrayal of Schaeffer, a used-car salesman, is so obviously inspired by Ric Flair that he even works in a few of Flair's signature "woos" in some of his dialogue. Beyond that, he dresses just as sharply as Flair, has the same hair, and the aviator-style glasses Flair used to wear. The character is almost a carbon copy of Flair during the 1980s.
7 The Ayatollah - The Wrestler (Iron Sheik)
The Iron Sheik was a larger-than-life persona outside the ring and even more so in the ring. Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri, the legendary Iranian wrestler who portrayed the WWE Hall of Famer, was the clear inspiration for The Ayatollah gimmick in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which starred Mickey Rourke as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a past-his-prime wrestler looking to turn his career around.
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Rourke, who won a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Robinson, wrestled a character known as The Ayatollah in his final match and the end scene of the film. Interestingly, The Ayatollah, a character that is clearly inspired by The Iron Sheik, is played by former WCW star Ernest "The Cat" Miller.
6 Jack Spade - Heels (Cody Rhodes)
Heels is a popular TV show about wrestling and family. Airing on Starz, the show centers around brothers Jack Spade (Stephen Amell) and Ace Spade (Alexander Ludwig) who compete for fame and stardom in their late father's small town promotion Duffy Wrestling League. Amell is a big wrestling fan who even wrestled on the inaugural All In, in 2018 and the show is about wrestling, so it's not a surprise some of its characters have been inspired by pro wrestlers.
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Amell, in particular, is close friends with Cody Rhodes and has even admitted to basing his character on The American Nightmare. "I watched Cody Rhodes do this with All In, which I wrestled in 2018," Amell said in advance of the release of the second season of Heels. "It was the biggest independent wrestling show ever. So I watched Cody do this."
5 The Boulder - Avatar: The Last Airbender (The Rock)
Some inspirations are a little more subtle, while others are blatantly obvious. When it comes to cartoon characters, creators don't necessarily have to hide those inspirations, especially when the character is voiced by a friend and former tag team partner of the wrestler on whom it is based.
That's the case with The Boulder in Avatar: The Last Airbender. The jacked-up character, who participated in the Earth Rumble tournaments and assisted in the invasion of the Fire Nation, looks like The Rock (when he had hair) and the creators barely changed his name. Moreover, Mick Foley actually voiced the character.
4 Jimmy King - Ready To Rumble (Jerry Lawler)
Over the years, there have been countless "King" characters in wrestling, so it's hard to directly attribute a single wrestler as the inspiration for Jimmy King, the villainous character in the 1990s cult classic Ready to Rumble, but the obvious inspiration is Jerry "The King" Lawler, arguably one of the greatest heels of all-time.
Oliver Platt, a five-time Emmy Award nominee, portrayed King in Ready to Rumble and dressed quite similar to Lawler, complete with the crown atop his head while walking to the ring. This was an interesting choice considering the Ready to Rumble film was essentially a movie promo for WCW.
3 Sgt. Slaughter - G.I. Joe (Sgt. Slaughter)
As far as finding TV, film, or cartoon characters based on real wrestlers, there's no more obvious example than Sgt. Slaughter in G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, which debuted in 1983 and ran for four seasons. The character, one of the toughest Joes in the cartoon, looks exactly like, is voiced by, and named Sgt. Slaughter.
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The Sgt. Slaughter G.I. Joe character also appeared in comics, other animated series, and was an action figure. The animated character makes no reference to professional wrestling in the series, but does use wrestling moves to hurt enemies.
2 Holly - Wifelike (The Undertaker)
Forgive yourself if you weren't aware that AEW's CJ Perry, formerly Lana in WWE, had an acting career let alone portrayed a character in a film she based on The Undertaker. Yeah, it doesn't sound real, but the Deadman was apparently her inspiration for her character of Holly in Wifelike, a Paramount+ film that has a 14 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
"It's definitely a cool departure from WWE where I was always in pink and getting my a** whooped. There I'm whooping all these big men's a**es, and I'm in black," she told Nick Hausman of Wrestling Inc, about the film. "And it's actually, the character was inspired from The Undertaker."
1 The Lover - The One and Only (Gorgeous George)
If the idea of "The Fonz" from Happy Days playing a flamboyant wrestler inspired by Gorgeous George sounds interesting then you need to check out The One and Only, a 1978 romance/comedy starring Henry Winkler as a 1950s-era professional wrestler.
Winkler's character Andy Schmidt is a failed actor who decides to try his luck in professional wrestling and, after several failed gimmicks, begins calling himself The Lover and dresses and carries himself much like Gorgeous George a few decades prior.
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