Dwayne Johnson

Dwayne Johnson wrestled full-time for eight years before he acted at all, and the WWF's Attitude Era is where the entire persona was built: the eyebrow, the pause, the ability to hold an arena on a single line. The Mummy Returns gave him a few minutes of screen time in 2001 and a spin-off followed almost immediately, which tells you how fast the transfer worked.

He is a far better comic actor than the box-office profile suggests, and the reason is counterintuitive: Johnson is funniest when he is losing. Central Intelligence is a whole film about an enormous man who is still the bullied kid underneath. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle has him playing a nervous teenager trapped in a hero's body, and it is by some distance his best sustained performance. Pain and Gain lets him be genuinely pathetic. Maui in Moana runs on the same engine, enormous ego over visible insecurity.

Then the brand hardened. Somewhere around Fast Five the persona became a set of rules about what he could be seen to lose, and the films got correspondingly weightless: San Andreas, Skyscraper, Rampage, Black Adam, each built around a man never in credible trouble. His films have grossed over eleven billion dollars, so the strategy is not stupid, only limiting, and the difference between those and Jumanji is entirely a question of whether he is allowed to be embarrassed. The Smashing Machine, where he plays the fighter Mark Kerr, is the first project in years that asks him to look diminished on camera.