ABSTRACT
World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) performers have long flirted with film, even as this dialogic relationship is mediated via live theatrical performances and televised productions.1 Wrestlers such as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (the highest grossing actor of 2013),2 “Rowdy” Roddy Piper (They Live [1988]),3 and Jesse “The Body” Ventura (Predator,4 The Running Man [1987])5 all adapted their in-ring performance skills for the big screen. Moreover, whether it is Sting’s face-paint inspired by The Crow (1994),6 the Legion of Doom’s Mad Max-style “Road Warrior” monikers,7 or Scott Hall’s Scarface gimmick,8 Razor Ramon, wrestlers have long brought recognisable tropes from big-screen action films into the squared circle, adding an extra element of drama to their performances, and personified popular and recognisable (and stereotyped) masculinities in the ring (the loner, the warrior, the mobster). But when performers Dustin Runnels and his then wife Terri brought the conventions of classical Hollywood glamour and cinema to the squared circle in the mid-1990s, they complicated the ways that gender norms operated in the ring.
