Cody Rhodes walked out on WWE to build a rival, then came home as its hero

Cody Rhodes

Photo: diegofernandophotography / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 30, 1985 Charlotte
Occupation	Professional Wrestler
Awards	Undisputed WWE Championship (3 times) · Men's Royal Rumble winner (2023, 2024) · King of the Ring (2025) · WWE Crown Jewel Championship (2024, inaugural) · ROH World Championship (2017) · NWA World Heavyweight Championship (2018) · AEW TNT Championship (3 times, inaugural) · IWGP United States Heavyweight Championship (2018)

WWE once painted Cody Rhodes’s face, zipped him into a bodysuit and sent him out to lose on the shows nobody watched. He quit, helped prove that a wrestling company could fill arenas without the one that had let him go, and then came back to play the most old-fashioned part in the business: the son finishing his father’s unfinished story. He has held WWE’s top championship three times since. Today he has no belt, a new contract that runs for years, a role as Guile in Street Fighter in cinemas, and Randy Orton telling him every Friday night that he lacks the nerve to be cruel.

The name arrived before he did. His father was Dusty Rhodes, the self-styled American Dream, and his half-brother Dustin made a career out of the gold-painted Goldust. He was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, but Georgia raised him. At Lassiter High School in Marietta he won two state amateur wrestling titles, turned down Penn State, and spent a year at the Howard Fine Acting School in Los Angeles instead. As a teenager he had legally added his father’s ring name to the family surname, Runnels.

His first WWE run lasted a decade and never settled on who he was. He debuted in the Ohio Valley Wrestling developmental territory in May 2006, seven weeks before his 21st birthday, then joined Orton in the faction Legacy, won seven world tag team titles with four different partners and the Intercontinental Championship twice. Then came Stardust, a spin-off of his brother’s character that turned into a comic-book villain. He later said he had pleaded with the writers for more than six months to drop it. In May 2016 he asked for his release. Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer summed up the run bluntly: his career “had gone nowhere.”

Outside WWE he dropped the surname, called himself simply Cody, and became the American Nightmare. He won the Ring of Honor World Championship in 2017, his first world title, and the IWGP United States title in New Japan Pro-Wrestling as part of Bullet Club. When Meltzer suggested that no independent show could sell ten thousand seats in the United States, Rhodes and The Young Bucks took it as a dare. All In, in September 2018, sold out in thirty minutes, the first event by a promoter outside WWE or WCW to move that many tickets in the country since 1993. On the first day of 2019 they unveiled All Elite Wrestling, with Rhodes as an executive vice president and, before long, its inaugural TNT Champion.

He left AEW in February 2022 after contract talks broke down, and within weeks he walked out at WrestleMania 38 as Seth Rollins’s mystery opponent. The goal he announced was the WWE Championship, the one title his father never held. That June he wrestled Rollins inside Hell in a Cell with his right pectoral torn off the bone, the bruise spreading across his chest on camera, and won before surgery kept him out for eight months. He returned to win the 2023 Royal Rumble, then lost to Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 39 when Solo Sikoa interfered, a finish that split fans and wrestlers alike. A second straight Rumble followed, the first back-to-back winner since Steve Austin in the late 1990s, and in April 2024, at WrestleMania XL, he pinned Reigns to take the title.

The reigns since have been shorter. The first ran 378 days and ended at WrestleMania 41, when John Cena beat him with help from the rapper Travis Scott. Rhodes won the King of the Ring tournament, took the title back from Cena at SummerSlam in August 2025 and stepped away for a month to shoot Street Fighter. Drew McIntyre took it from him in Berlin in January 2026; Rhodes regained it in March, beat Orton in the main event of WrestleMania 42’s first night in Las Vegas, and lost it in Riyadh in June, pinned by Sami Zayn in a three-way match with Gunther after 113 days.

Here sits the contradiction at the centre of his career. The man who helped build an alternative to WWE, and whose AEW sold itself as the anti-corporate option, now plays the corporation’s most earnest good guy, the one who talks about finishing his father’s story. The nickname American Nightmare promises an edge the character has rarely shown. Fans revolted online in early 2024 when WWE seemed ready to hand his WrestleMania match against Reigns to The Rock, a reminder of how little control he has over his own story. A section of the audience has long wanted a harder Cody, and WWE has teased that turn more than it has delivered it. Orton’s current storyline is built on exactly that doubt. On SmackDown in Sacramento this week Rhodes finally threw Orton’s signature punt kick, but at Baron Corbin, not at Orton.

Hollywood has been the side door. He played Derek Sampson, a drug dealer who cannot feel pain, in two seasons of Arrow, starred with his wife Brandi in the TNT reality series Rhodes to the Top and turned up as a bartender in last year’s The Naked Gun. Street Fighter, Kitao Sakurai’s adaptation of the Capcom games, gives him his largest role yet as the US Air Force officer Guile, beside Reigns as Akuma and Jason Momoa as Blanka. It opened on October 16 to more bad reviews than good, and weekend estimates still put it at the top of the North American box office. “I’d hope to stay Guile forever,” Rhodes told Extra, adding that he wanted to take on harder parts “because without films and things like this, I’m not going to get any good at it.”

Rhodes married Brandi Reed, a ring announcer and former wrestler, in 2013. They have two daughters, and he has said he wants to be present for them the way his own parents were present for every game and school event.

That ambition now sits inside a long-term WWE deal. “I just re-signed with WWE,” he said on Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant podcast this month. “So, I’ll end my wrestling career with WWE.” The New York Times reported the extension at five years, with room to leave for film work and return. The schedule does not wait for the press tour: WWE has advertised him against Zayn for the Undisputed WWE Championship on Raw in San Diego on October 19, while Orton waits on SmackDown to see whether the cleanest hero in wrestling can learn to fight dirty.

Tags: sports, athletes, Street Fighter, WWE, Cody Rhodes, professional wrestling, Roman Reigns