CM Punk has landed a supporting role in Netflix’s upcoming romantic comedy based on Katherine Center’s bestseller The Bodyguard, marking a new step in the WWE World Heavyweight Champion’s parallel career as an actor. The streamer’s adaptation pairs him with leads Leighton Meester and Jared Padalecki, who play a no-nonsense protection agent and the movie star she is hired to guard over the holidays.
The film follows Hannah Brooks, a disciplined professional bodyguard assigned to protect reclusive action hero Jack Stapleton from a stalker while he retreats to his family ranch in Texas. To keep his relatives from worrying, Hannah must pose as Jack’s girlfriend, a setup that turns a routine assignment into a romantic masquerade complicated by small-town scrutiny and family tension.
Punk will play a character named Doghouse, described in casting breakdowns as a physically imposing member of the security detail whose loyalty and dry humor steady the team around the high-profile client. The role slots him into the film’s inner circle of protectors, giving him room for comic beats while keeping him close to the central fake-relationship storyline.
Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum, whose credits include Netflix hit Purple Hearts and Disney musical Sneakerella, directs from a script by Erin Cardillo and Richard Keith. Producers Gina Matthews and Grant Scharbo are backing the project through Little Engine Productions, joined by Jared and Genevieve Padalecki’s Living in the Asterisk banner. Netflix has signaled that the holiday film will eventually premiere under a title different from the novel’s name, though that new title has not been announced.
For Punk, the casting extends a filmography that leans heavily on genre work. Under his real name, Phil Brooks, he carried the indie horror Girl on the Third Floor, appeared in the Soska sisters’ Rabid and played a small-town cop in vampire feature Jakob’s Wife. He next headlines the vampire-cop thriller Night Patrol and appears in Syfy’s horror series Revival, while also voicing a character in Zootopia 2.
Wrestling outlets have framed the rom-com as a personal milestone, pointing to Punk’s previous comments that landing a role in the genre sat high on his acting wish list. The timing adds another layer of visibility: he continues to anchor WWE programming as world champion, even as production firms around him build a screen persona that stretches from haunted houses to Hallmark-style Christmas settings.
