Michael Hickenbottom

Michael Hickenbottom has been Shawn Michaels for so long that the legal name is the surprise. Born in Chandler, Arizona in 1965, he wrestled in WWE for decades and left the ring widely rated among the best ever to do it, carrying three nicknames that have outlasted most of his contemporaries' entire careers: the Heartbreak Kid, the Showstopper, and Mr. WrestleMania.

That last one is not marketing, and the credit list proves it better than any highlight package. He appears on WrestleMania XX, 22, XXIV, XXVIII, 29, 31 and 41, plus Royal Rumbles a decade and a half apart, King of the Ring, SummerSlam, Vengeance. Nobody accumulates that record by being reliable in the middle of a card. What he did, over and over, was take a match that had to carry a stadium and make the crowd care about the least likely part of it, frequently by losing convincingly.

Since retiring he has become one of the industry's most consequential people off camera, as WWE's Senior Vice President of Talent Development and Creative, running the creative side of NXT, the company's developmental brand. That is the job where the next twenty years of the business gets decided, which makes it a more consequential post than most of the matches were.

There have been films too. He plays Luke Trapper in The Marine 6: Close Quarters and Doug in The Resurrection of Gavin Stone, and they are exactly what they look like.