Hulk Hogan died on July 24, 2025, at age 71 at his home in Clearwater, Florida.
The cause was a heart attack, acute myocardial infarction, confirmed by the Pinellas County Medical Examiner. He was filming a Netflix docuseries about his life when he died.
That docuseries, Hulk Hogan: Real American, premiered on Netflix on April 22, 2026. It is four episodes, each about an hour long, built around more than 20 hours of interviews Hogan gave before his death.
In the trailer, he said, “Some people hate me, but after I’m gone, I think people want to know the truth. Who was this guy really?”
He also said, “You want me to tell the truth? Okay. I know where all the bodies are buried.”
Whether he actually delivered on that promise is one of the more interesting questions the documentary raises, and the answer depends on who is reviewing it.
What Does The Documentary Cover?
The four episodes are structured chronologically. The first covers his childhood, a demanding father he desperately wanted to please, his early years in Florida, and his path into professional wrestling through the AWA.
The second covers the Hulkamania era in WWE, the explosion of the 1980s that turned professional wrestling from regional entertainment into a global phenomenon and made him the most recognizable name in the sport’s history.
The third episode picks up with his WCW comeback in the mid-1990s, where he reinvented himself as “Hollywood Hogan,” the villain, as part of the nWo faction, before covering his return to WWE at WrestleMania 18.
The fourth and final episode is where the documentary gets uncomfortable. Life after wrestling, the Hogan Knows Best reality show on VH1, the divorce from his wife Linda, and the racism scandal that destroyed his reputation in 2015.
The series was directed by Bryan Storkel and produced by Words + Pictures in association with WWE.
Triple H, Paul Levesque, WWE’s chief content officer, is among the executive producers.
The involvement of WWE in the production has been noted by reviewers, though reactions to what that involvement meant differ.
The Sportster called the documentary “a real and near perfect documentary because of its subject,” noting that “although WWE is attached, the series doesn’t feel like it came from them, that’s a compliment.”
The Hollywood Reporter was considerably less generous, calling it “a gap-filled piece of memorializing, corporate-backed hagiography” and arguing it was “more interested in celebrating Donald Trump than illuminating the man.”
The Man Versus The Character
The documentary’s central question is the gap between Hulk Hogan and Terry Bollea, the character versus the human being who created and inhabited him for more than four decades.
Netflix’s own promotional logline frames it this way, “Before he was Hulk Hogan, he was Terry Bollea. Uncover the man behind the legend.”
The Sportster noted that Hogan was historically a “notorious liar who invented tall tales easily proven wrong when he didn’t have to,” and that the Hulkster lived an impressive life that genuinely did not need embellishment.
In Real American, reviewers noted, he largely does not do that. He does not lay himself entirely bare, but he does not lean into the mythology the way he spent decades doing in public.
His ex-wife Linda Hogan agreed to appear in the documentary despite what is described as a very ugly divorce.
Reviewers noted there is a visible warmth in how she speaks about him, the Hollywood Reporter noted she spoke “passionately” about her ex-husband and that home videos show how “in awe they were of each other for so long.”
That is not the posture of a bitter ex-spouse, and her willingness to participate, and what she said, is among the more surprising elements of the documentary for viewers expecting a sanitized victory lap.
The Racism Scandal
In 2015, the National Enquirer published audio from a recording that contained Hogan using the N-word multiple times and stating he was “racist to a point.”
The recording was made during the same period as the sex tape that Gawker published in 2012, an affair he had with Heather Clem, then-wife of his friend DJ Bubba “the Love Sponge” Clem.
WWE terminated his contract immediately and removed his name and image from the Hall of Fame. He was later reinstated.
The docuseries addresses the racism scandal, and by the accounts of reviewers who have watched it, Hogan owns it.
He does not deflect entirely or pretend it did not happen. Whether the documentary goes far enough into what he actually said is a different question.
The Hollywood Reporter noted that the documentary “has no choice but to acknowledge the ‘racial slurs’ angle of the sex tape story, though if you’re unsure what the ‘slurs’ actually were, nobody says and the audio isn’t played.”
The homophobic slurs caught on the same tape, which received less public attention than the racial slurs but were similarly explicit, are not substantially addressed.
The Gawker Lawsuit And What Gets Left Out
The fourth episode covers the Gawker lawsuit, the $140 million verdict that was one of the most consequential media law cases in recent American history and ultimately drove Gawker into bankruptcy.
The Hollywood Reporter’s review was pointed about how the documentary handled it. The Gawker section “features no voices from the Gawker side and never mentions the name ‘Peter Thiel,'” the billionaire who secretly bankrolled Hogan’s lawsuit against the media company in what many journalists described as a targeted effort to destroy a publication that had covered him critically.
That omission changes the meaning of what the lawsuit was and why it succeeded.
Triple H Contradicts Hogan On The Booing
One of the most notable moments in the documentary involves Hogan’s final WWE appearance, the first Netflix episode of Raw in January 2025, where he was booed loudly by the crowd.
Hogan, in the documentary, attributed the hostile reception to his political associations, his vocal support for Donald Trump, his appearance at the 2024 Republican National Convention.
Triple H, also appearing in the documentary, contradicts that interpretation directly, acknowledging the crowd’s hostility was not primarily political but something more complicated.
Trump himself sat for an interview for the documentary, making Real American likely the only Netflix production to feature a sitting or former president in a wrestling docuseries.
The Last WWE Appearance And The Final Years
The booing at Raw in January 2025 was Hogan’s last WWE appearance. He died six months later.
By that point he had undergone numerous surgeries, multiple back surgeries from decades of wrestling injuries, neck fusion surgery in May 2025, heart procedures related to his atrial fibrillation, and reviewers noted footage of him being visibly propped up by younger wrestlers in the ring in his final appearances, continuing to perform out of financial need and contractual obligations long past the point where his body could sustain it.
Outside wrestling he had started Real American Beer, co-founded a new amateur wrestling promotion called Real American Freestyle with Eric Bischoff, and was reportedly in the process of opening a bar across from Madison Square Garden.
The documentary was supposed to be the definitive account of who he was. He died before it was finished.
The 20-plus hours of interviews he gave make it the most extensive record of his own account of his own life that exists.
Whether it is honest, complete or fair, to him, to those he wronged, to the sport that made him, is what viewers are now deciding.
