Hulk Hogan is a multi-talented man.
He's a musician, a motivational speaker, a Beach Shop proprietor, and even a pharmaceutical seller, with his own line of marijuana and mushrooms available in select markets, but to most, his status as one of the defining wrestlers of WWE's golden era will rise above all others, with spots on many a fan's Mount Rushmore still locked up to this day.
But did you know Hogan almost took things down a very different path, forgoing the squared circle to become Paramount's new golden boy? Well, according to Hogan – who is a, shall we say, dubiously reliable narrator – in an interview with Praise, that is 100 percent the case.
“It was a logical extension of where I should go in my career. Once the wrestling took off and the character Hulk Hogan became as big as the wrestling business at the time, people were reaching out to me to do other projects. Commercials, Super Bowl commercials, Right Guard commercials, all kind of stuff. The movies were a logical extension. Vince McMahon and I sat down and basically spent three days on Laguna Beach writing No Holds Barred, and then we brought a writer in to clean it up who got all the credit for it because we didn't know anything about writing or the Screen Actors Guild or the Writers Guild We didn’t know anything. We hired a writer to clean it up. We didn’t know he was gonna own it, which didn’t matter. But once I made that film, and it was successful, New Line Cinema wanted me to make more films. And the problem I had with it was I loved wrestling so much,” Hulk Hogan told Praise via Ringside News.
“And I was in the prime of my career, it wasn’t like I was on the downside and I was picking up extra work or trying to get out of the wrestling business become an actor. I was in. I was the World’s Heavyweight Champion Hulkamania was running wild. I was in front of 20-30,000 people every night. Now you want me to go sit in a Winnebago on the side of the Sony soundstage for 14 hours and you might call me at five o’clock to get in front of camera for five minutes. The process killed me. I mean, you know, and you know, there’s an art form to that. And the really good actors, you know, understand timing and exactly when to ramp up. And everything from the lighting to the camera placement to the cadence to everything, they understand it once they get in front the camera.”
Alright, so issues with the process of acting aside, why didn't Hogan opt against becoming the biggest actor in the world to instead stick it out with Vince McMahon and company? His love of the game.
Hulk Hogan couldn't abandon the Huklamaniacs to become a star.
Continuing his comments, Hulk Hogan explained why he opted to stick it out in the squared circle despite having Bob Evans, the then-head of Paramount, not the mac and cheese peddler, suggesting that he could become the next John Wayne.
”But for me, I was ready to jump off a cliff waiting for 10 or 12 hours for them to use me or they may use me first thing in the morning, getting in the makeup trailer at 5:30 in the morning [and] eight o’clock, I may do my first shot and then okay, well, hang on, we’re not sure if we’re going to need you for the rest of the day. So after lunch was over, no, you need to hang out. So I would sit there for 12 hours. And they would only use me for four or five minutes in the morning. So the process was hard. And so I always wanted to go back to wrestling. And I did. But I kept bouncing back and forth making small little budget movies for kids and having fun with that, you know, and shoot them and 25 to 30 days and running right back to the wrestling business,” Hogan noted.
“You know, and I had the chance to become like the next John Wayne. There’s a guy named Bob Evans, that ran Paramount. And he took me in his office and there was a big picture on the wall with Clint Eastwood and John Wayne and all the big stars Dustin Hoffman and everybody that was part of the contract players for Paramount at the time. And he said, ‘You’re gonna be my next John Wayne.’ And then he kind of like laid out the schedule and what was expected of me on and off camera. I went, ‘I am the wrong guy for that stuff.’ So I just decided to go back to wrestling.”
Could Hogan have become the next John Wayne, a genre-defining performer and certified movie star the likes of which lives on forever in the annals of film history? Maybe, but considering his resume, with such “classics” as Mr. Nanny and Suburban Commando highlighting his filmography, it's safe to say this might be one of those famous Hulkster exaggerations.
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