WILLOUGHBY, Ohio — Johnni DiJulius wasn’t blessed with height. He isn’t some hulking pile of muscles.

That didn’t stop him from becoming a top-level athlete.

“I’m not trying to take away from other sports,” says DiJulius, a member of the Ohio State University’s 2015 national champion wrestling team. “There’s hard work in every single sport there is, but you cannot be a 5-6, 5-7, 125-pound giant in football, but you can be in wrestling because it’s completely merit-based.

“There is athleticism, and there is God-given talent, but what you get is what you earn in wrestling.”

DiJulius — who was raised in Aurora and wrestled at Walsh Jesuit High School in Cuyahoga Falls, where he was a multiple-time state champ — is on the phone from his home in Cleveland’s Playhouse Square to discuss his recurring role in the new movie “Unstoppable.”

The film, which debuted on Amazon’s Prime Video platform last week, dramatizes the story of Anthony Robles, who didn’t let the fact he was born without his right leg stop him from becoming a championship wrestler himself.

Talk about earning what you get.

“A lot of people, throughout Anthony’s career, saw him as, ‘Oh my gosh, this poor thing — look at him trying!’” DiJulius says. “Then he started getting good, and people all of a sudden stopped pitying him and started saying something that makes me very irritated — they started saying he had an advantage because he had only one leg, which is just crazy.”

In fact, the William Goldenberg-directed “Unstoppable” covers some people suggesting Anthony has an advantage in that a second leg would put him into a higher weight class and, thus, he’s able to take on wrestlers who, in a way, are smaller than him.

“They never wrestled at a high level,” DiJulius says. “They probably never wrestled period, and they have no idea. The amount of will it has to take just to overcome what he overcame — you (see) in the movie he’d run up the Camelback Mountain in Arizona with one leg. He did stadium steps with one leg. Everything he did he did harder than everybody else because he had one leg. And everything he got in wrestling was because he earned it — not because he had some sneaky advantage.”

“Unstoppable” stars Jharrel Jerome as Anthony, with digital effects used to remove the actor’s right leg, and is chock full of noteworthy actors in supporting roles, including Bobby Cannavale, Michael Peña, Mykelti Williamson, Don Cheadle and, last but not least, Jennifer Lopez, who portrays Anthony’s likewise determined mother, Judy.

DiJulius portrays Matt McDonough, the seemingly invincible top wrestler with the powerhouse Iowa University program, with whom Anthony has two big matches, requiring the devoted Buckeye to become a Hawkeye on the screen.

“It’s funny — Iowa’s like the Ivan Drago of our sport,” says DiJulius, referring to the huge Russian boxer Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa must fight in 1985’s “Rocky IV.” “They are not the (New York) Yankees or (University of) Alabama football. It’s this robotic, we-kind-of-hate-everybody kind of team, this stigma they have. And it’s great for the sport of wrestling because it creates so much drama.”

DiJulius has been wrestling since he was a boy, when his late mother, Stacy, had the idea to take him to see a practice because baseball — the sport of his father, John — was helping to sap his boundless energy in the summer but only then. Too small for hoops or pigskin, he took to the mat right away and was nationally ranked by his middle-school years.

He says he verbally committed to Ohio State in 2009 during his sophomore year at Walsh, not long after winning his first state title and the death of his mother.

Was the post-high school goal always OSU?

“Come on, you’re from Ohio — you know what the goal is!” he says with a laugh. “THE Ohio State, baby! Yeah, of course it was.”

For a few years after college, he coached at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he also trained for the Team USA team. He eventually went a little stir-crazy, he says, and decided “to go travel the world” as a parachutist and BASE jumper — a pursuit that has earned him a combined 1.5 million followers via various social media platforms.

It was via social media that someone alerted him to this movie project, which he’d assumed was a small endeavor — not something from the new production company of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, Artists Equity.

After reaching out to the casting director, he learned they were looking for someone to portray McDonough, which would require a bit more than performing in the wrestling scenes.

For those scenes in “Unstoppable” — based on Robles’ book “Unstoppable: From Underdog to Undefeated: How I Became a Champion” — Robles served as Jerome’s body double, working with DiJulius for the far-away shots, Jerome subbing in for the close-ups.

“Wrestling is hard, and I would have to go three minutes with the real Robles, and then we would do four or five takes and cut, and I would get a fresh guy just dropped on me and have to start wrestling all over again, right?” he says. “Understand that is no easy task — it was exhausting. But, you know, the director had no idea. I’m looking at him like I’m fired up for every take.”

He says while people going to a wrestling tournament may be confused by exactly what they’re seeing on that, “Unstoppable” is easy to follow.

“It’s digestible,” he says “You don’t need to understand all the points and little intricacies of wrestling.”

DiJulius met Robles years ago when the latter came to speak to the Ohio State team, he says, and since working with him on the choreography for the film, they’ve been “super-tight.”

“I just had dinner with both him and Matt McDonough in L.A. last week, which is hysterical,” he says.

If DiJulius has his way, it won’t be his last time in front of a professional camera and says he’s enjoyed taking an “unconventional route” to acting.

“Am I gonna be some big Hollywood superstar? That’s not really what’s on my mind,” he says. “I’m excited to see what the future holds. I’m excited for wrestling to be evangelized (and) people get to see the sport that meant so much to me and gave me so much.

“It made me who I am today.”

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