Roddy Piper

Piper left home as a young teenager and built a career as a professional wrestler across North America through the 1970s and 80s, becoming one of the most recognizable villains in the sport before John Carpenter cast him in his first major film role.

Pro-wrestling's greatest villain became cult cinema's greatest drifter, chewing bubblegum and kicking ideology in Carpenter's They Live. Carpenter cast him specifically for his charisma as a professional wrestling heel, believing that skill translated directly to playing a working-class everyman pushed toward violent revolt.

The film's six-minute alley brawl with Keith David was largely unscripted and improvised between the two performers, drawing directly on Piper's real wrestling instincts, and has since become one of the most referenced and parodied fight scenes in genre cinema history.