An Emmy-winning actor who also holds a professional wrestling title
Paul Walter Hauser won a Golden Globe and an Emmy for playing a serial killer, voices Embarrassment in Inside Out 2, raps under the name Signet Ringer, and in April 2025 won a wrestling championship in Las Vegas. He then wore the belt to a Marvel premiere.
Hauser was born on October 15, 1986, and grew up in Saginaw, Michigan, the son of a Lutheran minister. He went to a Lutheran parochial high school, then left Concordia University Chicago to chase a showbusiness career. His film start was almost accidental: hired as an extra on Virginia, he complimented director Dustin Lance Black on the speech Black gave after winning his 2009 screenwriting Oscar for Milk, and Black responded by writing him a bigger part.
For years he was a dependable comic face, playing Shawn Eckhardt in I, Tonya and turning up in guest spots on shows from Community to It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The breakthrough came in 2019, when Clint Eastwood cast him as Richard Jewell, the security guard who spotted the bomb at Centennial Olympic Park. He went on to play a henchman in Disney's Cruella and the hapless Stingray in Cobra Kai, first as a recurring face and later as a major anti-hero.
Black Bird changed how people saw him. In the 2022 Apple TV+ miniseries, adapted from James Keene's memoir In with the Devil, he played the murderer Larry Hall, and critics singled out how unsettling and unpredictable he made the man. The part brought both a Golden Globe and a Primetime Emmy. That same July he released a rap EP, Murder for Higher. Later work includes Mike Batlan, Bruce Springsteen's engineer and guitar tech, and the villain Mole Man in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Wrestling is no side joke. His first professional match came in November 2023, for the Los Angeles promotion Pro Wrestling REVOLVER; he signed with Major League Wrestling in May 2024, and won the PROGRESS Proteus Title in a five-way match on April 17, 2025. By 2026 the PWI 500 placed him at No. 374 among singles wrestlers.
Source: Paul Walter Hauser
