Hulk Hogan is never one to shy away from making wild claims, and he did just that again by saying that Paramount Pictures head Bob Evans once told him he’d become the next John Wayne.
Speaking in a recent interview with Praise, the WWE Hall of Famer commented on his move into Hollywood in the late 1980s.
You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On his move into Hollywood: “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.”
On No Holds Barred: “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.”
On getting more opportunities after that: “Once I made that film and it was successful, New Line Cinema wanted me to make more films. The problem I had with it was, I loved wrestling so much, 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 try to get out of the business. I was the World 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 fourteen hours, and you might call me at five o’clock to get in front of the camera for five minutes. The process was hard, so I always wanted to go back to wrestling. I did. I kept bouncing back and forth, making small low budget movies for kids and having fun with that, and shooting them for 25-30 days and then running right back to the wrestling business.”
On his meeting with Paramount’s Bob Evans: “I had the chance to become like the next John Wayne. There was a guy named Bob Evans who ran Paramount. He took me into his office and there was a big picture on the wall with Clint Eastwood and John Wayne and all the big stars, Dustin Hoffman. Everybody that was part of the contract players for Paramount.
“He said, ‘You’re going to be my next John Wayne.’ Then he laid out the schedule and what was expected of me, on and off camera. I went, ‘Eh, I’m the wrong guy for that stuff.’ I just decided to go back to wrestling.”
