Ronda Rousey's Acting Career Takes a Hit

Back in the summer of 2014, there was a tectonic shift in the perception game around mixed martial arts. It may have gone relatively unnoticed at the time because tectonic MMA shifts were happening all over the place back then, but in the July 28 issue of The New Yorker, that paragon of cerebral sophistication and literary fussiness (the very opposite of the blood-splattered, manic world of MMA), there was a profile of Ronda Rousey, who earlier that month had demolished Alexis Davis in just 16 seconds, further solidifying the commonly held belief (echoed in that profile) that the women's bantamweight champion was a culture-changing figure, an unprecedented athletic force single-handedly dragging her sport and the whole human race into the future by pure will and talent. Hollywood was already knocking at her door. The future was wide open and paved with gold and victory. The New Yorker had written about MMA!

Yesterday The New Yorker published its latest story involving Ronda Rousey. This one, though, is about the newest movie mogul in Hollywood, Adam Fogelson, and his attempts to revolutionize the industry in our era of superhero franchises and little else, and it casts Rousey in just a small role. Still, it's a significant one to those of us interested in mainstream culture's still-tentative interest in MMA and in the bargains one makes (and the shifty worlds one enters) upon achieving fame in America.

Rousey, who has played small roles in three huge Hollywood movies since that New Yorker profile was published in 2014, has recently been making the move to star status. First came the news that she would be playing the lead in Nick Cassavetes' reboot of the 1989 Patrick Swayze cult absurdity Road House, and then it was announced that producer/director Peter Berg (Hancock, Friday Night Lights) had signed Rousey to play the lead in Mile 22, as a CIA agent trying to escape Jakarta with the help of an Indonesian cop. If Rousey's appearances in The Expendables and Furious 7 were bits of stunt casting, ploys to cash in on the growing popularity of MMA (popularity made possible by Rousey) and bump up those films' combat bona fides, and if Road House was just a grindhouse lark, then Mile 22, helmed by true a Hollywood player like Berg, would be designed to push Rousey into that rarefied air above the title, where stars live.

But Hollywood gives and Hollywood takes away, and primarily Hollywood typecasts, and now it appears that as Mile 22 has worked its way through the back rooms and hotel restaurants and boardrooms of Hollywood, Rousey has had superstar status snatched out from under her and once again been relegated to the role of the action-legitimizer, the ringer brought in to convince audiences the fighting is, pardon me, as real as it gets.

According to The New Yorker story, Berg was able to sell Fogelson on Mile 22 but not on Rousey as its star. Raising concerns about the fighter's admittedly wooden performance in Furious 7, the studio head pushed Berg to find a big-name star, like Will Smith, to take on the part of Silva, a shadowy "intelligence hack who's shoveled shit on four continents" whose role in the movie was tertiary: nothing a superstar would normally consider. And sure enough, Smith turned down the role (despite his love of MMA) and it eventually went to Mark Walhberg, who agreed to the movie only if his part was beefed up and he became, rather than the tragic turncoat who dies in the film's third act, its star, and possibly the center of a new franchise.

Berg signed off, as did Fogelson, and the film was rewritten, and Rousey was once more pushed into the role of the fighter without much acting weight to carry, yet another Randy Couture or "Rampage" Jackson. As Fogelson said, with true Hollywood sugar, the new script will allow "Ronda to do everything she can and should do without having to carry any undue acting weight." Jesus, in a town and an industry built on perception, that sentence alone, coming as it does from a rising Hollywood power player, could damn Ronda Rousey to the cold hell of typecasting, a hell from which there is usually no escape. Add to this the fact that Rousey lost her fight in December to Holly Holm, a fight that demolished the invincibility that Rousey's reputation, and more importantly Hollywood's interest in her, had been built on, and it's not hard to see that Ronda Rousey could be in trouble in motion pictures.

It's a cynical, debased, fickle world, Hollywood—one not even the cynical, debased, fickle world of professional MMA could have prepared Ronda Rousey for.