Wrestling with a Hulking legacy.
Netflix’s newest docuseries, “Hulk Hogan: Real American,” covers the WWE legend and Hollywood star’s life, career, family and controversies – featuring interviews with Hogan himself (born Terry Bollea), his first wife, Linda Hogan, his son, Nick Hogan, his longtime manager Jimmy Hart, and President Donald Trump, who was friends with Hogan and lauded him onscreen as a “good man” and “a nice guy.”
The docuseries (now streaming) was filmed in early and mid-2025, just months before Hogan died of a heart attack at 71 in July. His participation in it marks his final appearance onscreen, and final interview.
Here are the biggest bombshells.
The doc covers Hulk’s health problems, after his wrestling career and years of surgeries. On screen, he’s shown working out in his home gym, months before his death, using a cane.
“I feel okay but it’s a pain,” he says about his health. “I have my son take the tops off water bottles for me, because I can’t turn them,” he adds, referring to Nick, 35.
Depending on Nick to take the tops of water bottles off for him is “kind of embarrassing,” but it “keeps me humble,” he says.
Hulk recalls his childhood in South Tampa, Florida, with “broke” parents. His father was an “old school Italian” who was “rough” on him, he says.
“They weren’t the kind of parents to tell you they love you. That would never happen.”
His older brother, Allan, was “dad’s favorite” and the “tough guy.” Hulk recalls how he was “fat” as a kid, and his dad used to tell him, “you’re not like your brother,” which gave Hulk a “‘big chip on my shoulder.”
Later, when he is training for wrestling, one of the trainers breaks his leg, which he says was, “minuscule, compared to what [my father] put me through.”
Hulk was married to his first wife, Linda, 66, from 1983 until their 2009 divorce. Hulk welcomed two kids with her — Nick, and Brooke, 37, who was was estranged from him before his death and didn’t participate in the doc.
On screen, Hulk is demure about how he met Linda in a bar, went back to his apartment and “hit it off.”
Linda’s recollection of their first date is raunchier. On screen, she says that when they went back to Hulk’s “rickety ass old apartment,” he went into the bathroom for “the longest time,” and came out “completely naked.”
Linda remembers, “It was like when you go to the zoo and see a… wooly mammoth. He was huge. How many people can say they got f–ked by a giant?”
Hulk Hogan got his stage name from Vince McMahon Sr, the then-head of WWE. He had been using versions of the name “Hulk,” due to his stature (6’7 and over 300 lbs.), but McMahon told him to add “Hogan.”
“I said, what is Hulk Hogan?” Hulk says on screen, adding that he was Italian, not Irish like the name “Hogan.”
After McMahon told him that didn’t matter, Hulk said, “Yeah okay, I’ll think about it.”
Hulk’s career as a movie star took off after he appeared in “Rocky III” in 1982 with Sylvester Stallone.
Hulk recalls telling McMahon that he needed to leave to fly to Los Angeles to film it, and, “He goes, ‘No, you’re not, you need to drive all night.”
Hulk had to be on TV at noon the next day in Charlotte, North Carolina, for WWE promotion. He says that McMahon told him, “If you do the movie, you’re fired.”
The “Rock III” star says he had a “great rapport” with McMahon, “like a father son thing,” but he “just knew” he had to do the movie.
“[McMahon] said, ‘You’ll never work here again,’” Hulk remembers onvscreen. “I said, okay, cool.”
Hulk’s older brother, Allan Bollea, passed away at age 38 in 1986.
“We weren’t that close. He grew up really fast,” Hulk recalls. “By the time he was 17, he was riding with a bunch of bikers.”
After Hulk’s career took off, he recalls that Allan would often show up at his Oakland wrestling matches with “like, ten Hell’s Angels.”
Shortly before Allan’s death, he showed up in a parking lot and told Hulk that he just got out of rehab and needed money.
Hulk gave him the money but “didn’t take him with me,” when he left for a wrestling event. Later, Hulk got a phone call that Allan had overdosed and died.
“So I should have taken him with me, instead of giving him the money. So that was the last time I saw him. It was – that was a hard one to get over,” says Hulk.
Hulk “couldn’t handle” going to the funeral.
When the Netflix interviewer asks Hulk more about Allan, Hulk gets emotional and says, “You have to stop.”
“Back then, the mindset was steroids were safer than sugar. I first started using [them] two to three years after high school,” Hulk says on screen.
In the ‘90s, laws around steroids changed, and there “were a bunch of controversies,” he recalls.
In 1991, Hulk went on “The Arsenio Hall Show” and denied using steroids.
On screen in the Netflix doc, former wrestler Jesse Ventura says that everyone watching at home knew Hulk was fibbing. “All of us watching went, ‘Jesus!’”
Hulk got backlash, because the lie was obvious. Reflecting on the scandal, Hulk says, “It’s something that would be classified in the ‘mistake’ category. If I could relive it, I wouldn’t do it again.”
When “Hulkamania” was at its peak in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Hulk was “gone for 12 days and then only home for 2, sometimes,” Linda recalls, adding that she was “lonely” and “unhappy.”
When he was home, “he didn’t like to make a lot of conversation at dinner…he wasn’t Mr. Personality at home, anymore.”
When they did their reality TV show, “Hogan Knows Best,” which aired on VH1 from 2005 to 2007, they were excited because they thought it would be like “The Osbournes” or “Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica.”
Hulk says his marriage was “in shambles” at this time, and he hoped the show would, “bring Linda and I together…we could be excited about something, and move forward.”
“Hogan Knows Best” ended in scandal, after Hulk allegedly cheated on Linda with their daughter’s friend, Christiane Plante.
“Having your personal problems with your family being aired for public consumption caused all kinds of turmoil,” Hulk recalls.
Linda found out he was cheating when their housekeeper found a hoop earring in their bed, and it didn’t belong to her, she says.
He didn’t name Plante, or use the words “affair” or “cheating,” but Hulk describes her on screen as “a person I was dating who was part of the record company – almost like a chaperone for Brooke.”
As his relationship with Linda collapsed, Hulk says he returned from a wrestling event in Germany to find his house “cleaned out.”
“Safes were ripped out of the wall,” he says. “Everything was gone, except for my clothes.”
The bitter divorce was “a very very tough time,” Hulk recalls, adding that when he tried to call his kids, “nobody would ever answer.”
“It was to the point where we literally didn’t speak to each other anymore, at all,” says Linda. “So everything had to go through lawyers. It made it incredibly difficult for the kids.”
Linda started dating an 18-year-old who “actually went to school with Nick and Brooke,” Hulk says. “I could hear my boat start up every morning, and Linda’s 18-year-old boyfriend would back it out,” he says.
At the time, he gave an interview to Rolling Stone about how he understood OJ Simpson’s motives for allegedly killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. It was met with swift backlash.
“I spent 3 days with Rolling Stone, I thought the guy was my friend, we became buddies. All of a sudden, we were sitting on my back porch…. and he asked me about OJ Simpson,” Hulk says, adding that he wished he had “never done” that interview.
Following that incident, he attempted suicide, as he previously revealed.
“I started drinking and started eating pills, and I just went down this rabbit hole for a couple days. Next thing I know, I’m sitting in front of my bathroom with a gun in my mouth not knowing what I was doing,” Hulk recalls.
“I gave Linda 70% of everything,” Hulk says, adding that he never wanted to see his ex-wife again, “so I gave her everything to get rid of her. And after the divorce, I had no money. I was broke.”
Former wrestling promoter Eric Bischoff put together a deal for Hulk to go on TNA – Total Nonstop Wrestling – to make money.
Jeremy Borash, former TNA producer, says on screen that they wanted Hulk to wrestle and be part of their TNA roster in 2009, but, “it became very apparent very quickly he was in no shape to do that.”
Hulk says he had “a couple hip replacements,” and “a couple knee replacements ….my body just had had enough.”
Bischoff recalls that he felt “sh-tty about myself” for making Hulk return to wrestling, and it was “hard to see.”
Bischoff says on screen, “His back was in so much pain. I would literally have to go to his hotel, help him get out of bed, get into the shower,” to get ready to appear at events, “that he was contractually obligated to do.”
Due to his health problems, when Hulk returned to wrestling in 2009, he was using fentanyl, he says.
“I was taking 80 milligram fentanyls, two in the morning, stuffing them under my gums…I had two 300-milligram patches of fentanyl on my legs, and they gave me six 1,500 milligram fentanyl lollipops to eat,” Hulk says.
He added that a pharmacist told him “you should be dead…..we have never seen a human being take this much fentanyl.”
In 2015, Hulk was fired from WWE after he was caught using racist slurs in his sex tape that Gawker leaked. The ensuing Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit led to a $31 million settlement and Gawker going bankrupt.
Onscreen, Hulk says, “I got very mad about a personal situation, I used a word. Yeah, I regret it.”
He says that he should have “remained still” and “kept my mouth shut,” even under “that heavy crazy fire.”
He adds that he has regrets because he kept “saying stupid stuff and messing up.”
When Hulk appeared at Netflix’s WWE Raw event on January 6, 2025, the crowd booed him.
WWE superstar Natalya Neidhart recalls on screen, “I was backstage and I was like ‘holy sh-t, Hogan’s getting booed out of the building!’”
Fellow former wrestler Kevin Nash says he thought Hogan was getting booed for his support of President Trump.
However, WWE Chief Content Officer says he didn’t think that was the only reason. “He made a lot of mistakes. For some people, he hasn’t atoned for those mistakes or the apologies were seen as hollow.”
When asked if he was bothered by getting booed, Hulk says, “No, brother.”
He adds that the crowd was so “intense” in “coming for me – if they had a knife they would have stuck me in the neck with it.”
He wasn’t “upset” because he thought it meant he could perform as “a bad guy” and “sell out that building.” To him, that meant the crowd would “love to see my crippled ass get in that ring” and get “beat and punched.”
After his acrimonious divorce from Linda, Hulk was married to Jennifer McDaniel from 2010 to 2021, and to Sky Daily Hogan from 2023 until his death.
When asked about the happiest time in his life, on screen, Hulk says, that when his kids were “young and really healthy” and when Linda was being “the perfect mom” and “the perfect soul mate,” that was “probably the happiest I’ve ever been.”
For her part, onscreen, Linda says, “My love never faded for him. I still love him.”
“Hulk Hogan: Real American” is now streaming on Netflix.
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