The late action hero lives on through the jokes about his strength and aura.

The Chuck Norris fact: He will forever be the original meme

The late action hero lives on through the jokes about his strength and aura.

By Derek Lawrence

Derek Lawrence

Derek Lawrence is a former associate editor at **. He left EW in 2022.

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March 20, 2026 12:09 p.m. ET

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A portrait of the American actor Chuck Norris. Credit:

Kurt Krieger/Corbis via Getty

Rest in peace, Chuck Norris, the original meme.

The legendary figure died on Thursday at 86, but his legacy will forever live on through Chuck Norris facts. The *Walker, Texas Ranger* star was a lot of things: a military veteran, a black belt in multiple forms of martial arts, an action hero, and a true American badass. But he's also the person that the Boogeyman checks in the closet for, who beat the sun in a staring contest, and who doesn't breathe — he holds the air hostage. Or at least those are some of the "facts" that the internet has created about Norris.

In 2005, high school senior Ian Spector was playing around online when he became inspired by a list of fake Vin Diesel facts, and he soon came up with the idea to create a site built around insane "truths" about Norris and his tough guy persona. An internet phenomenon was born. Spector even got the chance to meet Norris once the trend exploded.

"He wasn't as tall as you would think," he told ESPN in 2023. "But he still stood there in a way where he could have definitely killed anybody else in the room." Fact!

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A few years removed from the end of *Walker, Texas Ranger* and even longer from his action-star era, Norris quickly embraced his sudden resurgence in pop culture. In 2006, he appeared on *The Best Damn Sports Show Period* and read a list of Norris facts, including his personal favorite: "They wanted to put Chuck Norris' face on Mt. Rushmore, but the granite wasn't hard enough for his beard."

While Spector wrote multiple books about the Norris anecdotes, the man himself got in on it too, penning a 2009 autobiography of sorts that combined his favorite "facts" with real-life stories.

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In 2026, there's a meme for everything and everyone, whether you're Leonardo DiCaprio, Kevin James, or Kermit the Frog. But Norris launched a thousand memes and jokes, to the point that, even in his passing, his aura and strength live on.

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