Then what about the safety protocols? I know in the ring you’re concerned about the other person’s safety. And their safety is definitely in your hands, as well as yours in theirs.
The safety in onscreen fighting I’d say is a lot tighter than pro wrestling. There’s a certain looseness in pro wrestling. There’s a certain improv that you don’t always know what your opponent’s going to do. And he might pull out something that you’re entirely not expecting. Then things go wrong, or people get exhausted in matches. And things that they usually do well, they’re suddenly not strong enough, or fit enough to suddenly pull out halfway through a match. Pro wrestling is a very dangerous world. And I’ve had enough surgeries to attest to that. I think the world of screen fighting is a lot safer because it’s a lot more controlled. It’s usually rehearsed several times before we shoot anything. Scenes are generally shot in smaller batches, and everything is a lot more precise.
We also get breaks between resets. You get your breath back. So you’re not generally exhausted, but things can go wrong. Sometimes you get kicked in the nose when you’re not expecting it. Sometimes you correct someone when they move the wrong way, and they forget their footing or something. I’d say the safety protocols are really tight when it comes to the armorers, the use of firearms, weapons, and things like that. So that’s where the real safety stuff kicks in.
You must come into contact with a lot of actors and wrestlers who are looking for that chance to break into stardom. What kind of personal advice do you give them?
I was fortunate in the sense that the opportunities I initially got in the film world were through WWE studios. In 2012 and 2015, I did movies through them. And that gave me my first taste of the industry. I was then able to explore a little further and use that as leverage to get other roles and things. So I don’t know what I would directly tell people about breaking into acting.
I would always say that performers in pro wrestling have to have a heavy focus on the character side of things. Many people think pro wrestling is just about two guys in a ring pretending to fight and do stunts with each other, which is a large part of it. For me, the beauty of pro wrestling was more about the storytelling, the characters, the speaking, the promos, and telling stories in that way. Rather than just purely focusing on the in-ring action.
If you’re good at speaking in pro wrestling, if you’re good at portraying characters, portraying storylines, that’s always going to hold you in good stead to transition to acting. I think we have a lot to thank in guys like The Rock and Dave Bautista, who’ve done brilliant things in Hollywood. Because in this day and age, I think the acting world looks at pro wrestlers very differently than they did 20 years ago. Pro-wrestlers in the world of acting was seen as an automatic, “Oh, this is going to be terrible. This guy is not going to be able to act. That guy’s going to be a disaster.” I think they look at it very differently now. The Rock is genuinely the biggest star in Hollywood now. His films consistently pull more money than anyone else.
Dave Bautista has been absolutely brilliant since he’s moved to that world. He’s had some high profile roles, but I’ve been more impressed in some of the lower-profile parts he’s done. And his acting ability is phenomenal. His facial expressions, the emotion he brings out. I think people realize that now. I’d say now is as good a time as any for a pro wrestler to start looking at opportunities in Hollywood. Especially in action and superhero movies, there’d be a lot of crossover from the world of pro wrestling that I think could work.
“…the beauty of pro wrestling was more about the storytelling, the characters, the speaking, the promos, and telling stories…”
I would imagine the characters you’ve created in wrestling guide the roles you pursue, or even more so the parts you’re asked to do.
Yeah, there’s a level of being typecast because I’m six foot six and 250 pounds. I’ve got tattoos, big muscles, and a broken nose. There’s a limited number of things that people would ever think to consider me for. I’ll give you an example from when I was living in Manhattan. Shortly after I left WWE, I got with an agency out there who sent me out to various auditions. The roles that they were tending to put me forward for were great. But they were gigs for things like, “Okay, this guy’s a doctor. Why don’t you go read for this? They want a doctor.” So I would turn up. And I’d just know the second I walked in the room. You’ve got this casting squad there who’d take one look at me and say, “Okay, this guy could never be a doctor. He’s too big.”
It’s not that I couldn’t be a doctor because there are people out there who look like me, who are doctors. It’s almost like Chekhov’s Gun theory where, “Okay, this doctor is big and strong looking. We can’t just have him play a doctor. There has to be a reason why he’s so big and strong, which we’ll find out in the third episode where he goes back and starts beating everyone up,” or something like that. There’s almost like this inherent thing built in when you’re a big guy that you can only be in any role if that size is eventually used in some way. There are limitations, but there’s also a massive expanding world.
And if you look at what the big films have been over the last few years, they have been a lot of these big superheroes, the Aquaman type stuff. Jason Momoa’s been fantastic. And he absolutely in a different lifetime, would have been a pro wrestler. I know he’s got this amazing film career, but he looks and acts in that pro wrestler style. So that’s the kind of thing that you can expect to be involved in, and being the doctor on some movie probably less so.
The Rock played the Tooth Fairy, so you can play anything.
Exactly. Yeah. I watched that at the time, I thought it was great. He dropped his ego for that one. It’s another bizarre way the absurd humor of putting this big, strong muscular guy in a little Tooth Fairy costume was kind of the absurdist nature of it. But yeah. I mean, things like that are going to come up.
Yeah. The Rock eventually got the writer and director of Fighting With My Family out of that film. So it worked out that way.
Oh right. Okay. Who was that Stephen Merchant? Yeah, I love him.
