10 Wrestling Characters Played By Multiple Wrestlers
Turns out wrestlers can regenerate just like The Doctor.
The similarities between wrestlers and actors are plain to see.
Both tell stories, both follow scripts, and both end up going through multiple divorces. The only difference is Lawrence Olivier never hit anyone with a piledriver... that we know of.
So, if wrestlers play characters in the same way actors do, then it makes sense that they can be recast just as easily as in the world of film, TV, or the stage.
Whilst a wrestling persona's popularity is often closely tied in with the actual performer, that hasn't stopped promoters from attempting to present different people as beloved characters.
Equally, sometimes a wrestler notices a character getting over and decides to "liberate" so of its qualities for themselves. Stealing finishing moves is one thing, but stealing an entire gimmick? It happens, you know.
We've rounded up ten copycats, epigones, and imitators who all attempted to pass for an existing wrestler.
Sometimes this went well, and the impersonators actually had better careers than those they were impersonating.
In most cases though, their time pretending to be someone else was short-lived, often serving to remind us how good the original was...
10. The Nature Boy (Buddy Rogers/Ric Flair/Buddy Landel)
Buddy Rogers was famously the first man to ever hold the WWE Championship. Ric Flair is the joint most decorated world champion in wrestling history (the most if you ask the man himself). And Buddy Landel was... well, he was a wrestler too.
All three men had one thing in common though - they all shared a very famous nickname.
Rogers started going by Nature Boy in the early 1950s. A cocky, strutting villain with bleach blonde hair, Rogers reinvented what it meant to be a wrestling heel and set the standard for all baddies who followed him.
One of said followers was Ric Flair who, in the 1970s, also adopted the moniker. As well as that, he also copped Rogers' look, attire, and finishing move. Well, they do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
As for Landel, he was even more brazen, using the Nature Boy persona and gimmick at the same time and in the same promotion as Flair! Although, he wasn't nearly as successful as the two that came before him.
Three men, three very different careers, one nickname, absolutely no idea what it means.
Seriously, what is a Nature Boy?