10 Wrestling Stars Who Reinvented Their Way To Longevity

Reinvention is a particular difficult skill to master, so it would be remiss of us not to include some honourable mentions here.

Daniel Bryan was meant to have zero personality prior to his proper WWE debut. It's funny, then, that he managed to demonstrate oceans of it in his beatdown of Michael Cole during the first season of NXT, before demonstrating incredible versatility as both a tyrannical boyfriend to AJ Lee and the heir to Dusty Rhodes' humble man of the people throne.

Like the Undertaker before him, Sting discarded a winning act in the name of character development, transitioning from Surfer to Crow as a means of creating a storied chase in his takedown of the NWO.

Shinsuke Naamura wasn't always an inexplicable fusion of Michael Jackson and a deranged martial arts extraordinaire - he was once a relatively bland proponent of puroresu with little to distinguish himself from the pack.

Though he didn't dream up his nightmarish gimmick, Windham 'Bray Wyatt' Rotunda has still managed to make it his own with his unique, self-penned promo work, to which he purportedly dedicates large swathes of his time.

Finn Balor's transformation has been remarkable - especially since, unlike some of the other luminaries on this list, his origins as a full-on wrestling personality were discouraging. As a standout of New Japan's junior heavyweight division, Devitt's babyface character was fairly generic. His entrance music - Joe Esposito's wonderfully cheesy "You're The Best Around" - hinted at the personality within. But it was only when Devitt turned heel, formed the Bullet Club and kickstarted wrestling's cosplay trend that he was granted a springboard from which to fully reveal it.

And, last but certainly not least, The Rock went from chipper bland babyface, to arrogant upstart, to catchphrase-generating man of the people, heel and back again, before unveiling his best-ever Hollywood Rock persona, one which was as notable for its nuance as its verisimilitude.