I was broke until I was 40. Really broke. I could get by, but I had nothing. No health insurance, so if something happened I was screwed. I was lucky my parents had money and my brother was willing to support me for a long time. Once I started doing standup, I had an income, and that was amazing to me.
I was broke until I was 40. Really broke. I could get by, but I had nothing.
I was three times AAU All-American World Champion and I had rough time. I was broke, no money and everything was bad for me until WWE.
When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it.
Oddly, moving to L.A. had nothing to do with me wanting to be an actress. My mother had a friend who was willing to take us in for a month until we could get on our feet. So we lived on her floor. It was pretty traumatic, but I found my strength through my mother in that time because she never once made us feel like we wouldn't be OK.
A long time ago, we had to build interfaces to connect with other companies, and I thought that was a great idea. The company had to pay a lot of money to build it and basically launched it, but our whole operating system almost broke. So, we couldn't continue it. In the end, I had to go on the train to Paris to explain that I had spent millions.
I met my wife, I had no money, I had nothing, and I started my family without really, my career was nowhere, but I had these other businesses, I had these things I was doing to be able to afford a small home.
There was some conflict there over Saturday nights because we were all really broke in those days- all the money you had in the world was in your pockets. Nowadays when you're say you're broke, it's not the same thing.
In the U.K., we always had a special relationship with the audiences because it wasn't 'More Than Words' that broke us: it was 'Get The Funk Out' that broke first. That was what we had always dreamed of.
I got sick, hospitalized, had no insurance. And the money I had saved for our honeymoon went to pay medical bills. So I had been in the position of not having insurance when I needed health care.
My approach in 1999 was basically to play what I had, that was all I could do. At the time I was broke. I think I only had one guitar, a flametop green Jackson and I had these DC-10 Mesa Boogie heads. I think I had a cheap Shure wireless.
I've been hit with kendo sticks and chairs; I've been thrown through tables, broke my ankle, broke my nose, and have had concussions in WWE, but nothing has hurt me more than when I stubbed my toe in 'The Marine 3: Homefront.'
After I broke my leg I had to go back and do one of the remakes of 'The Magnificent Seven' and ended up on a horse that pitched me off and broke my leg again... I rode horses pretty well. I just didn't like doing it.
We are all hostages of time. We each have the same number of minutes and hours to live within a day, yet to me it didn't feel equally doled out. My illness brought me such an abundance of time that time was nearly all I had. My friends had so little time that I often wished I could give them what time I could not use. It was perplexing how in losing health I had gained something so coveted but to so little purpose.
During my career as a standup and actor, I realized it was very frustrating for me to get hired because Hollywood was hiring a different kind of brother, you know, and I was doing political humor... In order for me to really have a long career, I'm going to have to learn how to write and produce for myself... I had no idea I was really going to like it and I'm very fortunate to be successful. But the idea was to always eventually create something for myself. That was the idea from the beginning when I went into writing and producing.
My parents taught me to be optimistic and independent. They made me feel that I could do anything I set my mind to, which has really helped me. They didn't make allowances for me because of my height. I had to do everything my brother and sister had to do, including raising our animal menagerie that included cows and chickens.
Nineteen was the first time I really had a real relationship, really fell in love, really had my heart broken, really broke her heart, and sex meant something a little bit different.