Denzel Dejournette has always been drawn to underdog stories. In many ways, that’s his story, too. A professional wrestler leaving the ring to vie for a spot in a highly selective acting program—it sounds like the perfect setup for a movie. And the movies are exactly where the actor has his sights set.
Dejournette is in the second year of UT’s Master of Fine Arts in Acting program, which is recognized as one of the best in the world. But his path to Rocky Top was not a typical one for a theatre student.
“I always wanted to be an actor, but I didn’t do the things that it would take to be an actor, because I did sports in high school,” says Dejournette, who grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “I don’t think they advertised arts very much then, and you had to pick one or the other.”
He wanted to play football in high school, but his coach required players to participate in another sport, which led Dejournette to wrestling and eventually to Appalachian State University, where he earned a master’s degree in exercise science.
“If you saw where I started from, you wouldn’t have guessed that I would have been the guy that got a Division 1 wrestling scholarship,” he says.
Dejournette was in the lower tier of recruits when he began college but ended up being the only athlete from his class to go All-American, a designation given to only the best athletes in their sport.
Theatre faculty members screen as many as 700 prospects to find around eight students to join each year’s graduate acting cohort. Dejournette had all the qualities they look for: talent, presence, openness, humility, and an eagerness to learn and grow.
It was this underdog story that Dejournette believes helped him earn a spot in NXT, the league in which the World Wrestling Entertainment organization develops its next generation of professional wrestlers.
Beginning in 2018, he performed with NXT, picking up the moniker Desmond Troy in 2020. Dejournette debuted on WWE’s two prime-time shows, Monday Night RAW and SmackDown, in April 2020, but the pandemic put a squeeze on the organization, forcing them to trim down their roster of wrestlers in 2021.
Dejournette says he had always promised himself that if professional wrestling didn’t work out he would make a run at acting. So when he was released from the WWE, he took it as a sign that it was time to go after his dream of becoming an actor.
In his training for the WWE, he had worked with Marissa Chibás Preston, an acting coach hired to help the wrestlers translate their physical work to the screen. She encouraged him to pursue acting and wrote a recommendation letter that helped him land a spot at UT.
Assistant Professor of Theatre Katie Cunningham, who recruited Dejournette to UT, saw his potential during an audition.
“I was immediately captivated and impressed by how his presence and charisma came right through the screen,” says Cunningham, who is also head of acting. “It was clear to me that Denzel had star power. But it wasn’t until his callback, when we got to interact with each other and I was able to see more of his work, that I discovered what a warm and genuine person he is.”
Theatre faculty members screen as many as 700 prospects to find around eight students to join each year’s graduate acting cohort. Cunningham says Dejournette had all the qualities they look for: talent, presence, openness, humility, and an eagerness to learn and grow.
Dejournette’s background may have been a little unorthodox, but Cunningham says having a larger wealth of knowledge on which to draw is a boon for acting students and their classmates.
“I think I brought a different perspective and a different energy that I think could be a breath of fresh air for the group,” Dejournette says. “The way that I approach things is a little bit different, because I don’t have the rigorous [acting] training that others may have.”
Denzel Dejournette in the Clarence Brown Theatre production of Cry It Out. Photo courtesy of Clarence Brown Theatre
His time with the WWE did give him experience acting on national television, and the collaborative nature of professional wrestling added to that strength in an unexpected way.
“It is storytelling at the end of the day, but you still have to be in shape and have the conditioning because you’re wrestling each other, but you have the other person’s life in your hands,” he says.
Dejournette recalls performing a scene in class with a fellow actor that required some physicality. He was able to use a trick he learned during his time in the WWE to make it look better and keep them both safe.
That openness to learning from one another and sharing experiences and connections are just a few of the things Dejournette appreciates about the MFA program.
Many of the professors still actively work in the field, gathering new insights to share with their students.
“Our professors have a great balance of experience and knowledge,” Dejournette says. “They’re very transparent with you about the business. I think they create a nice balance of ‘This is where you can be, and this is what you can do’ to prepare us to be the best performers we can be.”
And the same is true for alumni of the program who come back to conduct workshops.
Last year Dejournette got to work with Tramell Tillman (’14), who stars in Apple TV’s Severance and landed a role in the next installment of the Mission Impossible franchise.
Dejournette put the skills he’s learning in the classroom into action this fall when he provided the voiceover for a UT commercial that airs nationally on television during athletics broadcasts.
As he looks toward his future, Dejournette says he hopes to take what he learns at UT and move to Atlanta to pursue a career in the television and film industry. He would love to have an acting career on par with that of Oscar winner Denzel Washington.
Flashing a million-dollar smile, he says with a laugh, “There’s definitely a reason why my mom named me after him!”