At WWE WrestleMania 39, Cody Rhodes Will Complete the Long Journey Home
Driving home from an evening workout at his Nightmare Factory gym in Atlanta with 11 days until a career-altering main event match against WWE Universal Champion Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 39, Cody Rhodes is primarily preoccupied with how it will impact the women who helped mold him.
"The four people I think about when I go out there are my mom, my wife, my sister and my daughter," says the 37-year-old second-generation pro-wrestling superstar in recognizing his wife Brandi, daughter Liberty, older sister Teil and mother Michelle.
"This is so fun what I get to do, but they've got the last name, and I just want to make sure that they're held in the highest regards," he said. "I want to make sure my decisions reflect well on them."
Heavy is the head you might say, but there's a lightness to Rhodes throughout his two wide-ranging interviews with B/R, a contrast to the contentious onscreen chemistry he's co-created with Reigns since earning the right to challenge for his title at the Royal Rumble in January. It's also a likely coping mechanism to avoid being overwhelmed by the wider implications of the annual industry spectacle, taking place Saturday and Sunday at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.
The staging marks a sort of homecoming for Rhodes, who enrolled in a Los Angeles acting studio 18 years earlier after a standout high school wrestling record in his hometown of Marietta, Georgia, all with an eye on following in his family's footsteps.
That's not the narrative he's chasing in the final build, though.
"If I look at the fact that I was out there in Hollywood at 19 years old, at the Howard Fine Acting Studio, couldn't find a date, didn't have a clue, and that town just chewed me up and spit me out and I went back home…. If I really take in all the variables of every little step along the way for me to get to this, that's too much for one person to carry to the ring," he acknowledges.
"I mean, my dad's nickname for me in high school was 'Hollywood.'"
The Son Also Rises
For the uninitiated, Rhodes' father is late squared-circle legend and WWE Hall of Famer Dusty Rhodes, known colloquially as The American Dream.
Dusty unequivocally helped pro wrestling get over the hump of cult attraction in the 1970s and '80s with transcendent everyman appeal and unrivaled in-ring chemistry opposite adversaries such as Ric Flair and Superstar Billy Graham.
Cody's half-brother, Dustin, has been drawing crowds in and outside of WWE since the late 1980s. But neither elder has ever been a world champion.
If Cody conquers Reigns it will not only represent a high watermark in his own 16-year career but also something sincerely momentous for both the Rhodes legacy and fans steeped in how that legacy is inextricable from the sport's modern history.
This match versus Reigns, himself the latest fruitful branch of a dynastic family tree that includes his cousin, The Rock, is wrestling storytelling at its purest—mythos made tangible.
It's the occasion that, in his former acting coach Howard Fine's estimation, Rhodes has been primed for since he first transitioned from the Lassiter High wrestling mat to a modest L.A. apartment he shared with Teil in 2004.
"He had two things," Fine recalled. "One was the natural wit."
Fine shares that it was Rhodes who named the acting studio's softball team the Fighting Corgis, an ironic wink to the breed's notoriously anxious disposition.
"The other thing is he's also emotionally available and able to tap into his life experiences. When you get a muscular, athletic guy, they're often shut down emotionally. He's not that way. He's very vulnerable and present."
That much is evident in Rhodes' almost pathologically measured pauses before answering questions about how he's gotten from points A to B to Z while running down his American dream.
When pressed to pinpoint a through line in the life experiences he's channeled, the once-undefeated high school champ takes a beat before opening up that, in his view, "I grew up second string. And what I mean by that is even when I was good at something, my dad was still Dusty Rhodes, right? And that's great, but that puts something in you that makes you shoot for moments and expectations that are so wildly large, because you need them to be that large for you to get out of second string.
"The story of how great I was as an amateur wrestler is really fun, but I didn't have Dustin's athleticism, I didn't have Dusty's interview [skills], I didn't have my sister [Teil's] acting chops. I felt like I was always behind somebody, and when you feel that way, it drives you."
Chasing Roman
Rhodes is willing to admit that, more recently, he felt like he was lagging behind Reigns, Seth Rollins and their seminal 2010s stable, The Shield, instilling a mild inferiority complex.
Rhodes feuded with Rollins for much of 2022, famously enduring a grotesquely torn pectoral muscle to compete—and triumph—against him at the Hell in a Cell pay-per-view last June, before missing six months for surgery and rehab.
"It's like I was looking in the mirror and had their names on a Post-it." It was a reminder, in his words, that, "If you're gonna be at that level, you're gonna have to be that good."
Reigns will have held the Universal Championship for 944 consecutive days heading into 'Mania, making him the longest uninterrupted titleholder since Hulk Hogan in the mid-1980s. However preordained his run, it was still contingent on him staying healthy, no guarantee given he missed significant time due to a recurrence of leukemia in 2018. That was accomplished in part by booking him how top dogs such as Hogan were traditionally booked back in the day, i.e. minimizing work rate in a way that actually amplifies their aura. Less, in other words, is more.
The upshot is that, since snagging the universal belt from "The Fiend" Bray Wyatt in August 2020, Reigns has honed his swagger and manifested unquestionable clout as the sport's biggest attraction since pre-Hollywood John Cena.
While Rhodes is loath to indulge the larger metatextuality surrounding his and Reigns' clash ("It's for someone like you to look at this story and define it," he demurs), those who know him best are more than happy to testify to his readiness.
"Roman has really submitted himself as one of the greatest champions ever," says longtime family friend and WWE Hall of Famer Diamond Dallas Page, who was present in the stands with Dusty when Cody capped off his undefeated junior season at Lassiter.
"{Cody} will deliver, because he loves the pressure," Page adds.
"A lot of people can't handle that. He's been imagining himself there for many, many years, and it looked like it was never going to happen, but it never stopped him."
Nightmare Fuel
It was only when Rhodes' goal of being viewed—and viewing himself—in the same class as his popular peers felt most out of reach that he took total control over his story.
For nine years starting in 2007, he competed in WWE under a variety of thinly veiled guises, including leaning on his heritage as part of a tag team with fellow scion Ted DiBiase Jr.; fomenting midcard mischief as a "Dashing" doppelganger of his authentic self; milking the medical necessity of a protective mask for maximum heat (and merchandising potential); and assuming a mischievous, balletic alter ego dubbed "Stardust" as a complement to brother Dustin's polarizing Goldust persona.
The latter assignment showcased his theatricality, but it took a toll on his self-esteem (and, arguably, his esteem, period).
That's when Rhodes roiled the wrestling world by departing WWE in May 2016 to barnstorm independent promotions and eventually co-found his ex-employer's most viable competition in generations: All Elite Wrestling. Perhaps most subversively, he curated his own repackaging as a neck-tattooed, peroxide-blonde badass pointedly anointed "The American Nightmare."
During his three-plus years as executive vice president and marquee onscreen talent for AEW, he helped carry the insurgent company through COVID-restricted broadcasts and the chaos of booking and promoting a flurry of signees.
He also accepted numerous extracurricular assignments via AEW's TV partner, WarnerMedia, including a reality show documenting his and Brandi's life called Rhodes to the Top and serving as a judge on TBS' antic Go-Big Show. (That's without mentioning his side hustle as a cigar entrepreneur.)
As Teil confides, Cody had stacked his deck of commitments precariously high.
"People forget that during the early AEW days, you have this really hot thing and then the pandemic hits," she explains. "You're trying to figure out how to keep producing a TV show when half your colleagues are on the West Coast, so during that time, he didn't sleep. It was work, work, work.
"Those other things that were brought under the umbrella of the media company, you want to try them, but he was definitely spread thin, and when you really get down to the brass tacks of who Cody is, he is a pro wrestler. That's what he loves, it's his whole life."
He's also, since welcoming Liberty into the world in 2021 alongside Brandi, more family-oriented than ever. The sharper edges of AEW's TV-14 programming became increasingly incompatible with Rhodes' priorities as a father, but ironically, it was his dual capacity as mentor to the promotion's expanding roster of young recruits—a role his dad took on behind the scenes with WWE in his final years—that crystallized what would come next.
"I was letting some of them beat me long before they should ever beat me," he confesses of AEW's upstarts. "I wanted them to succeed, and I still do, but it wasn't time for me to be a coach. It was time for me to be a player."
Living the Dream
Rhodes amicably parted ways with AEW in February 2022, and according to Teil, he's been far more focused since re-signing with WWE and shedding some of those added responsibilities.
"Not that it's easier," she clarifies, "because he's just an intense person."
Despite being shelved with the pec tear for so long, Rhodes' reconnection with the WWE fanbase has been steadfast and intense. Or, as Page theorizes, precisely because of his visceral sacrifice.
"I think the fans really fell in love with him when he took that jacket off in that match with Seth," he says, invoking how dramatically and authentically bruised the entire left side of Rhodes' upper body appeared. "You could feel the hush, like, 'Whoa.' When people see you working through that, that's where you get that incredible respect."
Respect also translates to dollars, and the bottom line is what keeps you at the top of the card.
Reports indicate Rhodes is among WWE's top merch movers. His most recent Ultimate Edition action figure? Out of stock at the time of this writing. It appears he intuited correctly that six years of burnishing tough-guy bona fides on the indie circuit and in AEW would provide the necessary heft to augment his instincts as a populist entertainer. He was finally elevated to the rarefied air that felt so out of reach, even if he's still technically looking up at his WrestleMania opponent.
Recalling his dynamic confrontation with 6'3", 265-lb. Reigns on the March 20 episode of WWE Raw, Rhodes says, "I purposely put my feet right where his feet were in the mat. I didn't want to step closer to the hard cam to make myself look taller. I was just staring a hole through him. There's a special tension to it."
The entire Rhodes clan is experiencing that tension in its own way. As Cody himself allows, any family member who signs their checks with that last name is invested in its collective reputation, but Teil doesn't hesitate in declaring, "No one is better prepared to carry the banner of the Rhodes family than Cody."
That's most apparent when you consider the way Stardust's face paint, spandex and Riddler-like theatrics have, like a magic trick, rematerialized into the bespoke-suited, body-inked, battle-scarred picture of poise that's been cutting viral promos week after week.
From the moment he returned to WWE last April, on up through his comeback from injury at the Royal Rumble, Rhodes has functioned simultaneously as the face of Raw and SmackDown and hype man for the roster as a whole—a self-actualized sweet spot almost two decades in the making. Or, depending on your point of view, multiple lifetimes.
"People will say, 'Why does Cody always talk about his dad?' or they'll bring that up that it's a regular thing in interviews or how emotional I am over it all," Rhodes says.
"And it's always fun to see and it's never gotten under my skin. But what I noticed with this [WWE run] is it's not always me who's bringing him up. It's everybody else.
"But for me to be able to finish the story right at the biggest event in the history of wrestling absolutely means the next story is about just me. It isn't tied to anything else. I feel the stakes going into WrestleMania this year. I'm not buckling beneath them. I'm trying to use them to embolden me and strengthen me."
As he pulls up to his driveway for dad duty, the son of a son of a plumber confirms, "I feel like I've settled into The American Nightmare in a way that is so genuine that the name almost sounds ridiculous when I hear it. But I mean, it's on my skin."
And come Monday morning, the world title that has eluded his family for nearly half a century might finally be around his waist.
