Film

Andre the Giant

Name: Andre the Giant
Genre: Documentary, TV Movie
Released: 2018
Cast: André Roussimoff, Hulk Hogan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Vince McMahon, Ric Flair

This HBO Sports documentary traces André Roussimoff from a farming village outside Paris to the main event of the WWE, and briefly to Hollywood, using archive footage and interviews with wrestlers, promoters and co-stars. It's affectionate and fast-moving, more tribute than investigation, best suited to fans nostalgic for the era rather than viewers wanting a hard look at the industry that used his size.

TMDb rating

7.3

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Beyond the Mat1999

Barry Blaustein's fly-on-the-wall classic gets backstage access no promotion would allow today, showing the toll the business takes on bodies and minds long after the cameras cut. It's the film Andre's story keeps circling back to.

But It's bleak in places — Jake Roberts's arc especially — with little of the triumphant spectacle wrestling usually sells.

Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows1998

Made just before the infamous Montreal Screwjob, this doc captures Bret Hart defending wrestling's honesty at the exact moment the business is about to prove him spectacularly wrong. Essential for the machine Andre helped build.

But Heavy on 90s WWF politics; you'll want at least passing familiarity with the era to feel the sting.

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The Iron Claw2023

A dramatized, ferociously acted account of the Von Erich wrestling dynasty that shows exactly what the Andre doc only gestures at — how the sport chews up the men who build it, generation after generation.

But It's fiction, not documentary, and genuinely upsetting; several real tragedies play out with little softening.

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Something you would not have found on your own.

Freaks1932

Andre's film is gentle about the carnival economics of a body built for spectacle; Freaks, made decades earlier, stares straight at the ugliness of that economy and asks who the real monsters are.

Tod Browning's pre-Code horror classic, cast largely with actual sideshow performers, is still startling ninety years on — a film that demands empathy for the 'freaks' while indicting the audience that pays to gawk at them.

But It's genuinely uncomfortable by design, and its treatment of disability, however sympathetic for 1932, hasn't aged simply.

The Princess Bride1987

Watch the gentlest, funniest performance of Andre's life — Fezzik the giant, all warmth and no menace — right after learning what the role cost his failing body just to stand upright on set.

But It's a fairy tale, not wrestling history — pure comfort viewing with none of the documentary's darker context.

Dark Side of the Ring2019

This anthology series does for dozens of other wrestlers what the Andre doc does for him: unpicks the myth-making and shows the human wreckage the industry left behind, episode after unflinching episode.

But It's grim by design and occasionally sensational — pick your episodes carefully or it becomes a slog.

Nature Boy2017

Ric Flair's ESPN 30 for 30 is the closest thing to Andre's film in shape and scale: another mythic wrestling body examined with real affection and real honesty about the wreckage of excess.

But Flair is a much less sympathetic subject than Andre, and the film knows it — expect more discomfort, less warmth.

The Wrestler2008

Mickey Rourke's comeback performance as a broken-down journeyman is fiction, but it's the emotional truth the Andre doc keeps hinting at — the loneliness of a body built for other people's entertainment.

But Slow, sad, and deliberately unglamorous; there's none of wrestling's showmanship here, just the cost of it.

The Resurrection of Jake The Snake2015no page yet

A rawer, smaller-scale companion piece — one wrestler's decades-long fight with addiction, filmed with none of the polish of a network doc. A good corrective to any nostalgia Andre's story might leave behind.

But It's a rough watch with a real person in real crisis, not a tidy narrative arc.

The Truman Show1998

Wrestling runs on kayfabe — the pretense that the show is real — and Andre performed a persona for a public that mostly couldn't tell where the giant ended and the man began. Truman lives that exact confusion, just without knowing it.

Jim Carrey, remarkably restrained, plays a man discovering his entire life has been a broadcast for other people's entertainment — a sharp, funny, quietly devastating flip side to a career built on performed reality.

But It's a satire, not a sports story, and the tone is cooler and more paranoid than anything in the doc.

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Both stories concern extraordinary bodies made into public property. Andre's film stays focused on the ring and the laughs; Lynch's stays entirely with the loneliness and cruelty of being stared at, which the wrestling doc only touches in its saddest stretches.

David Lynch's black-and-white drama, based on the real life of Joseph Merrick, is one of cinema's most compassionate portraits of a body treated as a curiosity — devastating, tender, and beautifully shot.

But It's slow, sombre, and carries real grief throughout — nothing here to lighten the mood.