Hulk Hogan’s final years are coming back into focus in a grim way, with a new docuseries laying out just how far his painkiller use had gone after his divorce and during his TNA comeback.
In Netflix’s ‘Hulk Hogan: Real American’, the wrestling icon, who died at 71 in July 2025, spoke bluntly about the amount of fentanyl he was taking while trying to push through serious physical pain in 2009. The comments are difficult to ignore, especially because they came from Hogan himself in what became his final interview. What emerges is a picture of a man physically wrecked, financially cornered, and relying on extreme amounts of medication just to get through the day.
Hogan Described a Shocking Level of Fentanyl Use
Hogan said his pain had become so severe that opioids became part of his daily routine. “I was taking 80-milligram fentanyls, two in the morning, stuffing them under my gums here,” he said. “I had two 300 mg patches of fentanyl on my legs, and they gave me six 1,500 mg fentanyl lollipops to eat.”
He then recalled a pharmacist’s stunned reaction. “You should be dead. We have never seen a human being take this much fentanyl.”
That alone would have been enough to alarm viewers. Then came Eric Bischoff’s account, which pushed the story even further. The former wrestling executive, who helped Hogan get into Total Nonstop Action Wrestling, said Hogan was taking handfuls of pills that “would kill a horse” while also drinking heavily. Bischoff said it was hard to watch Hogan become so dependent on substances during that period.
Divorce, Pain and Isolation Pushed Him Deeper
The series ties much of that spiral to Hogan’s 2009 divorce from Linda Hogan. According to the documentary, the split left him broke and in no shape for the demands of a wrestling schedule, but he still needed the money. Bischoff described how bad things got behind the scenes, saying he sometimes had to go to Hogan’s hotel room and help him get out of bed and into the shower before shoots.
Hogan also described how relentless the pain had become. “I had to sleep in a chair,” he said. “And if I just twitched my finger like that, my whole back would spasm and torque.”
The documentary suggests the divorce also stripped away much of his support system. Hogan said calls to his children often went unanswered, leaving him increasingly isolated while his body kept breaking down.
Hogan died after suffering an acute myocardial infarction, or heart attack, following a cardiac arrest call at his home in Clearwater, Florida. Reports later said he had also been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm, and chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a form of cancer. In the end, the image that comes through is not the larger-than-life showman, but a man in deep pain trying to hold himself together.
