Roman Reigns
- Byname of:
- Leati Joseph Anoa‘i
- Also Known As:
- Leati Joseph Anoa‘i
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Roman Reigns (born May 25, 1985, Pensacola, Florida, U.S.) is an American professional wrestler, athlete, and actor. He is best known for holding multiple championships in World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) as one of the company’s most notable stars.
Born into a renowned American Samoan wrestling family, Anoa‘i was surrounded by ring legends. His father, Sika, was one half of the Wild Samoans tag team, and he counted among his extended family a number of wrestling greats and WWE stars such as Rikishi (Solofa Fatu, Jr.), Yokozuna (Rodney Anoa‘i), and, perhaps the most famous member of the Anoa‘i dynasty, Dwayne (“The Rock”) Johnson.
However, despite growing up in a family of grapplers, his first athletic endeavours were in American football. After playing in high school, Anoa‘i played college football as a defensive tackle for the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. He was undrafted in the 2007 NFL draft and was later signed and subsequently released by both the Minnesota Vikings and the Jacksonville Jaguars without having played in any regular season games. He eventually landed in the Canadian Football League as a member of the Edmonton Eskimos (now the Edmonton Elks) but was released by that team in 2008.
Anoa‘i started his professional wrestling career in 2010 and joined the company Florida Championship Wrestling, where he appeared under the ring name Roman Leakee. In 2012 he made his debut as Roman Reigns on WWE’s developmental TV show, NXT.
Reigns would transition to WWE’s main roster as part of a stable (small alliance) known as The Shield alongside his fellow wrestlers Dean Ambrose (Jonathan Good [who later used the ring name Jon Moxley]) and fellow WWE mainstay Seth Rollins (Colby Lopez). The trio had an impactful debut at the 2012 Payback event, where they disrupted the main story line between CM Punk (Phillip Brooks) and Ryback (Ryback Reeves) to help Punk keep the title. In their first few years in WWE, the group was featured in a number of major story lines and won tag team and midcard titles. Although all three men were each popular in their own right, Reigns was the standout of the group, earning the nickname “The Big Dog.” In 2014 he was voted superstar of the year by fans in the WWE Slammy Awards poll.
That same year The Shield broke up with a shocking story line in which Roman was betrayed by his stablemate Rollins. The resulting story line would lead Roman Reigns to becoming a main event player in WWE, a position cemented with his win in the Royal Rumble match in early 2015. Although now portrayed as a WWE hero, Reigns proved to be a polarizing figure when it came to crowd reactions. Many members of the wrestling fandom felt that his ascension had been rushed and attributed his early success to his familial connections. His appearances were met with some of the loudest reactions among the WWE roster, as dueling chants of support and derision erupted from the crowds during his matches. His rise was tempered by his failure to secure the WWE Championship in the main event match at WrestleMania 31 against former UFC star Brock Lesnar; both men lost when Reign’s rival Seth Rollins invaded the match and won instead. Despite this initial setback, later that year Reigns won the WWE Survivor Series Championship by defeating his former stablemate Dean Ambrose. He would go on to compete successfully in other WrestleMania main events, including against WWE hall of famers such as Triple H (Paul Levesque) and The Undertaker (Mark Calaway).
The upward trajectory of Reigns’s career took an unexpected downward turn in 2018 when real-life health issues disrupted his in-ring success. During an October episode of WWE’s TV show Raw, he addressed the arena full of fans while out-of-character, telling them he was just “a guy named Joe.” That night, he revealed to the stunned crowd that he had been diagnosed with leukemia 11 years earlier and that the disease had now returned. He relinquished his title as WWE Universal Champion—earned in August of that year against Lesnar—to put his wrestling career on hiatus as he pursued treatment. The following year he returned to WWE and announced that his leukemia was in remission. In early 2020 Reigns challenged Universal Champion Bill Goldberg to a match at that year’s WrestleMania. However, the COVID-19 pandemic arose soon thereafter, and Reigns declined to appear at the event because he was immunocompromised.
Later that year, Reigns once again returned to WWE, but his character now had a more villainous persona. Having aligned himself with notorious wrestling manager and advocate Paul Heyman, Reigns acted in a confrontational manner, threatening and manipulating those around him as though he were leading a criminal empire. He declared himself “The Tribal Chief” and “The Head of the Table,” which would stick as new nicknames for him. Reigns regained the WWE Universal Championship in Payback 2020 when he defeated WWE superstars Bray (“The Fiend”) Wyatt (Windham Rotunda) and Braun Strowman (Adam Scherr) in a Triple Threat Match. He would go on to defeat several other notable opponents, including John Cena, Kevin Owens, and Drew McIntyre (Andrew McLean Galloway IV).
Reigns was soon joined by his twin cousins (and fellow members of the Anoa‘i family) Jimmy and Jey Uso (Jonathan and Joshua Fatu), who interfered on his behalf to help him win matches. They even got involved in the main event match of WrestleMania 37, in which Reigns defeated both WWE hall of famer Edge (Adam Copeland) and beloved grappler Daniel Bryan (Bryan Danielson) by pinning them at the same time. In 2021 Reigns once again wrestled in the main event of WrestleMania, this time defeating his archrival Lesnar for the WWE Championship. After winning both major championships in WWE, Reigns was declared the undisputed WWE Universal Champion.
Reigns and his cousins became a faction known as The Bloodline. The Bloodline’s Uso twins frequently helped Reigns cheat so that he could win his high-profile matches, keeping him as the dominant champion. The group eventually recruited other members of the Anoa‘i family, and the Bloodline’s many deceptions and betrayals were regarded by many as some of best storytelling ever seen in professional wrestling.
The popularity of Reigns and The Bloodline story line led WWE to its most financially successful period in company history to date. Viewership of the wrestling brand was higher than ever, as WrestleMania 38 was the most viewed event in WWE history. Reigns became the de facto face of the company in marketing and on merchandise, and he made promotional appearances on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on NBC and Conan on TBS. His reign as the undisputed WWE Universal Champion was compared to the historic reigns of wrestling legends Hulk Hogan (Terry Bollea) and Bruno Sammartino. Cody Rhodes sought to end Reigns’s historic title run at WrestleMania 39, but Reigns was able to stave off the challenge.
In addition to his late-night television appearances, Reigns began an acting career. He appeared in the 2019 film Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw alongside his cousin Dwayne Johnson. In 2020 he appeared in the Netflix film The Wrong Missy, and he voiced characters in the animated TV series Elena of Avator (2020) and the family film Rumble (2021).