Normal Jobs WWE Stars Did Before They Were Famous

Being a professional wrestler is a dream job for a lot of people. You get to travel around the world to cities and countries some could only dream of, if all goes well you can end up being an inspirational figure for those who need someone to look up to, and if you land a role in a company like WWE or All Elite Wrestling, you can easily become a millionaire in no time at all. 

For many top WWE Superstars, being in a wrestling ring is all they have ever wanted to do, to the point where many of them will simply say "I don't know" when met with the question "what would you be doing if you weren't a professional wrestler?" However, there are some very famous names who did have a regular job before they were bitten by the wrestling bug. While some people are born into the industry, just look at anyone with Hart, Rhodes, or McMahon as their surname, but others needed to have a job going on the side to support their early years of training, and even the first few years of their career as working on the independent scene wasn't enough for them to get by on a week-to-week basis.

That is what we are here to talk about today, the mundane, 9-to-5 careers that some of the biggest names in the wrestling business had before the bright lights of WWE took them to new heights. While there is nothing wrong with any of the professions we are about to list as they most certainly deliver a good living for people all over the world, the idea of some of WWE's biggest names working in these jobs should be a reminder that anyone can achieve their dreams if they work hard enough. 

"The Phenomenal" AJ Styles knows that he is nearing the end of his wrestling career, stating recently that he would like to be officially done with wrestling by the time he turns 50. Styles has got to where he is in wrestling not only because he can do things in the ring that other wrestlers couldn't execute in 1,000 attempts, but also because he made some very big decisions in his first few years in the business that turned out to be the right moves in the long term, despite not seeming like it at the time.

One of those decisions was turning down the opportunity to sign a developmental contract with WWE in 2002 as Styles wasn't comfortable moving his to Cincinnati, Ohio with his wife as she was about to finish her studies at college so that she could become a teacher. On top of that reason, Styles was offered $500 per week by WWE, roughly the same amount of money he would get from his job as a water delivery man.

Styles has opened up about his water job in the past, stating that it was actually the perfect job for him when he started wrestling as it allowed him to train for much cheaper. Rather than paying with money, which he didn't have, Styles would bring water, which he had almost too much of, to his trainers for them and the rest of the athletes. This water delivery job was also the reason why Styles turned down the chance to work for WCW as they were also offering $500 per week to sign a developmental deal with them in 2000, though he would sign a contract with WCW later on, only for the company to be bought out in 2001.

History was made in 2019 when Becky Lynch ended WrestleMania 35 with both the WWE Raw and WWE SmackDown Women's Championships lifted high above her head. "The Man" became the first woman in history to win a WrestleMania main event, something that seemed like an impossible dream just a few years earlier as Lynch had actually retired from wrestling just four years into her career. 

In 2006, Lynch suffered a serious head injury during a match in Dortmund, Germany, forcing her into an impromptu retirement as a result, and while she would make sporadic appearances on the UK independent scene between 2006 and 2013, Lynch would take up a number of different jobs. Of the jobs Lynch had, the one she saw as the most serious was her role as a flight attendant for Irish airline Aer Lingus. Lynch explained in an interview back in 2017 that working as a flight attendant gave her the work ethic and discipline to be on time for everything, mainly because if she wasn't on time for work the plane would literally take off without her. 

On top of traveling the skies with one of Ireland's most well known airlines, Lynch would eventually move to the United States on a permanent basis where she would become a waitress in an Irish pub in Manhattan, New York, a job Lynch knew she wasn't very good at but she got by enough to make ends meet and eventually try her hand at acting. It was through her desire to become an actress that she ended up training at a gym in Chicago for stunt work on the show "Vikings," but she was encouraged to try out for WWE due to her wrestling background, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Until very recently, many people would have loved to have been chauffeured around in a limousine by John Cena, but after he turned heel at the 2025 Elimination Chamber, it's safe to say that no one would trust themselves getting into any sort of vehicle with the man formerly known as the Doctor of Thuganomics.

Long before he was main eventing WrestleMania's and kicking Cody Rhodes in the groin, Cena actually pursued a career in bodybuilding as he idolized WWE Hall of Famer Hulk Hogan growing up. Given Hogan's physique during his prime years, plus the fact that he was from California, Cena moved to the west coast to boost his chances of becoming a bodybuilder, but he would ultimately end up gravitating towards professional wrestling at the turn of the of millennium. Before he moved to California, Cena landed himself a job as a limo driver in Boston in order to get by amongst other jobs, but according to Cena himself, he wasn't great at the job.

In an interview with Bloomberg in 2021, Cena revealed that he was terrible at being a limo driver and that he was late to his first job. Everyone has probably been late to their own job at least once in their lives, but Cena's limo arrived to its destination three hours after it was supposed to because he got lost. The ironic part about Cena getting lost on his first day as a limo driver is the fact that at the time, he was literally living in his car because he was that poor, meaning that he would spend almost his entire time on the road due to lack of funds. Cena now rides as a passenger in most limousines, and he's probably very happy about that.

Hooters has been around for over 40 years, and as of 2025 has over 430 restaurants around the world. Thousands of girls have passed through the famous restaurant as waitresses and bartenders, including former WWE Women's World Champion Liv Morgan, with Hooters inadvertently being part of the reason why Morgan is in WWE today.

Morgan's journey from working at Hooters to championship glory came through the former manager of the specific Hooters restaurant she worked at, who just so happened to be a WWE Superstar at the time. Morgan explained in an interview in 2024 that the current manager at the time would let the WWE Superstar know about Morgan and how much of a fan of the business she was, leading Morgan to be put in contact with legendary strength and conditioning coach Joe DeFranco, who has also worked with Triple H. She would secure a spot at a WWE try-out event in 2014, and was signed to the company later that same year. While Morgan is flying high in WWE, the Hooters brand has struggled in recent years, and in February 2025, the company officially filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The former WWE Women's World Champion didn't want to reveal the name of the WWE Superstar who used to manage the Hooters she worked at in her 2024 interview, but the unnamed star is none other than Enzo Amore, who confirmed that he used to manage a Hooters restaurant on social media. Morgan and Amore would date for a brief time after she had been signed to the company, with Amore already being a member of the roster, but the two would break up after Morgan accused Amore of cheating on her, hence why she didn't want to give his name any exposure.

Jon Huber, better known to WWE fans as Luke Harper, and to All Elite Wrestling fans as Mr. Brodie Lee, passed away in December 2020 just ten days after his 41st birthday. It was a death that shook the wrestling world to its core, and his memory still lives on in both companies as his wife Amanda regularly works with AEW, and his son can consider Cody Rhodes a close friend of his. On top of being one of the most celebrated big men of his generation, Huber also had one of the strangest pre-wrestling jobs out of everyone; a grade school librarian.

Huber told the story of how he worked at a school as a librarian before, and during his wrestling career, on an episode of Chris Jericho's "Talk is Jericho" podcast. Due to the fact that he would only work independent dates at the time, Huber was able to balance his day job with his professional wrestling career before making wrestling a full-time gig. However, there were days where he would get some weird looks from students and other staff members as he would show up to work with bumps, bruises, and in September 2008, stitches in his head after working with Claudio Castagnoli in a bloody and violent steel cage match for the CHIKARA promotion.

Fortunately, Huber was able to cover up the stitches by wearing a hat to work that day, but as his career in wrestling started to grow, he would wear those scars proudly as his work in places like CHIKARA and Dragon Gate USA would earn him a WWE contract in 2012. He would be a popular WWE Superstar for eight years before departing in the spring of 2020 to become the leader of The Dark Order in AEW.

Long before people acknowledged him as the Head of the Table, before he was ever close to becoming The Tribal Chief, and even before he walked around claiming he was "The Big Dog," Roman Reigns had a normal job like everyone else.

Originally, Reigns had eyed up a career as a football player after a successful run as a defensive tackle in high school, leading to him being signed by the Minnesota Vikings in 2007 after going undrafted in that year's NFL draft. He would later be signed by the Jacksonville Jaguars for one week (yes, one week), before traveling to the Canadian Football League's Edmonton Eskimos in 2008, but was released at the end of the year and left football behind.

Reigns wouldn't sign with WWE until 2010, meaning that in 2009, he would simply install office furniture for his sister's business as a way to make a living. This was the same company that both Jimmy and Jey Uso worked for before their uncle, former WWE Superstar Umaga, landed them jobs in WWE. As you can imagine, Reigns hated his job, despite being involved in a family business, stating in an interview with ESPN that he knew he wasn't meant to be wearing a furniture shirt every day and that the world has something out there for him, he just didn't know what it was.

However, he did say that the reason he took the job was because he had recently become a father and knew he needed to provide some sort of income now that his football dreams were over. Reigns is now one of the highest paid wrestlers in the world, and in 2024, he surpassed Hulk Hogan for having the most WrestleMania main events in WWE history with nine. 

Sheamus is one of the longest serving wrestlers on the WWE roster at the time of writing as he has officially been with the company for 18 years. Given his striking look, many people won't be able to imagine The Celtic Warrior in any other profession, but he did have two wildly different jobs before he became a full-time wrestler.

The first, and the more mundane of the two was working as an IT consultant. While the company he worked for is relatively unknown, Sheamus worked as an in-house consultant helping the company improve their technology and solved a number of problems with their computers and IT systems.

The other job, and the one that is far more exciting was working as a bodyguard and bouncer for Lillie's Bordello nightclub in Dublin, Ireland. The reason why this is the more exciting of the two jobs isn't just because he had to stop hundreds of drunk people from making even bigger fools of themselves, but because of one very famous individual who used to be a frequent visitor of Lillie's Bordello. That individual was none other than U2 singer Bono. Sheamus has clarified that he wasn't specifically hired to be part of Bono's personal security and was simply an employee of the nightclub itself, but part of his job description was to make sure that the rock star, in his words, "didn't get his head wrecked" by people with too much Guinness in their system asking for autographs.

Once his days as a bouncer were over, Sheamus would move to England to pursue his wrestling dreams properly, and to make things come full circle for him, his first appearance on WWE TV came as a security guard, where he was laid out by Triple H.

To avoid any confusion, the man many people know today as Mistico in CMLL is not the version of Sin Cara this entry is about. This is about the second version of Sin Cara who originally wrestled in WWE as Hunico, who would adopt the Sin Cara gimmick after Mistico left the company to return to Mexico. With all that said, the last place anyone would expect Sin Cara to have worked before becoming a wrestler would be a funeral home, if anything most people would predict someone like The Undertaker to have had that job, or even someone like Paul Bearer.

During a 2019 interview, Sin Cara was asked what career he would have gone into had the dream of being a professional wrestler not worked out for him, and to everyone's surprise, he said he would have become a funeral director or an embalmer, arguably the two jobs furthest away from being a luchador. However, the reason behind this is that is the business his family is in, and that he worked in the funeral home his family ran as a teenager. This might sound like an intimidating job for someone so young, but due to it being a family business, Sin Cara not only admitted to it feeling normal, but even revealing that he and his young family members would play hide and seek in the caskets.

Now wrestling under the name Cinta de Oro, the 47 year old primarily wrestles in Mexico for various independent promotions, and despite his family history, he has yet to encounter any casket, or buried alive matches since his WWE release in 2019. However, if he was to ever have one of those bouts, Sin Cara would at least know where to get good quality caskets.

Picture this. You live in India and you've just broken the law. The police are hot on your tail as you try to avoid getting arrested, but it's no use and you're cornered with nowhere to go. However, you think that if you put up a good enough fight you might just be able to escape without facing jail time. Then, you see that one of the police officers is over seven feet tall, has hands the size of your rib cage, and looks like the last person on earth you would ever pick a fight with. That is what some people in India had to deal with in the 1990s as WWE Hall of Famer The Great Khali served as a police officer before he was a wrestler.

Due to his Acromegaly diagnosis as a child, Khali would grow up to be a giant of human being to the point where he was picked on school. However, his size would end up being a blessing to an extent as he dropped out of school and landed a job as a security guard for a wealthy Indian businessman. His work as a guard led to him joining the Punjabi Police Force, where he would end up having a very respectable career as an enforcer of the law, after all, who would ever disobey someone who looked like Khali.

His job would play a factor in Khali becoming a wrestler as his schedule allowed him to visit the local gyms on a regular basis to work on his physique, and through his workouts, Khali would set his sights on becoming a professional wrestler, and decided to quit his job in the police force so that he could move to the United States pursue his dream.