You don’t have to be tall to be “the big guy”. Look at Arnold. He’s barely 6 feet. But he acts big. You get the Terminator roles when you act like one.
I think Mr Rock is the current “big guy”. He has Arnold’s send of humor and comic timing. He seems approachable. He even made Baywatch a fun movie.
Dave Bautista could be, but he looks like I should be afraid of him. He did a good acting job in Glass Onion, but now I hate him. What a jerk his character was!
Andre was not 7’4" tall. It is said that if he could straighten his spine he might have been that tall, but he couldn’t. He could always walk under a 7’ high bar. If you stretched my spine until I had an extra 3/8" between each of my vertebrae I’d be 7 feet tall but I’d be in a lot of pain just like Andre would if you straightened out his spine somehow.
If you’re talking about Paul Wight, aka The Big Show, just an aside:
His 2020 Netflix sitcom The Big Show Show was fun, heartwarming couch candy during the early part of the COVID pandemic. For viewers that can no longer abide 1980s-90s style sitcoms, it won’t have appeal. But for others, it’s worth a click.
I would love to see Wight get a second turn in something with a profile and some marketing behind it.
The actor (Paul Benedict) who played the nextdoor neighbor on The Jeffersons had acromegaly, but it was undiagnosed. Until a doctor was in the audience at a play Benedict was in. The doctor went backstage afterwards and told the Benedict to see a doctor about the condition. He had treatment and avoided most of the serious issues with the disease. He did have a large and rather oddly shaped face, though.
For the really big dudes, that’s often a large part of the roles they play. They should look scary / dangerous. They’re the berserker personal combat enforcer dude against whom mere mortals stand no chance.
One who looked like a 7’ version of the late Mr. Rogers, complete with red cardigan and gentle measured voice, wouldn’t cut it. Not at all.
But it would be funny to see some of the current berserkers play the Mr. Rogers role in e.g. an SNL skit.
You could make a case for Brian Posehn and Steve Agee, who played gay lovers in The Sarah Silverman Program. There’s also Kevin Brown and Grizz Chapman, gentle giants who were part of Tracy Jordan’s entourage. They’re not as imposing as Andre, but they each take up considerable amounts of space.
Sidebar - when in college, my wife worked security for a wrestling show involving Andre. Her impression was extremely negative - even compared to the other wrestlers. I believe the more polite descriptors would be along the lines of “unbelievably stupid, rude, and smelly.”
Just last night we saw Struycken in Gerald’s Game, a 2017 Netflix thriller. He was still scary enough in it (with plenty of makeup) to give my wife proto-nightmares.
I think the fact that there are so many names being put up, that it proves the negative: There is no “one” big guy that plays the cultural role that Andre filled in his time. When I was a kid everyone knew him, and there just weren’t any other guys that you’d even try to compare to him. None of the names suggested so far are so well-known that they pretty much exclude every other guy from the “Big Guy” discussion.
I have to say that Shaq is the stereotypical “huge guy” based on hearing him referenced at times as the default reference when you want to talk about someone big. He’s in the public consciousness due to his ubiquity; sports, movies, television, commercials. He’s everywhere and a household name.