Amateur wrestling was never considered a big box office draw because they're really competing but they're not getting a chance to call each other 16 kinds of names before the fight to get you interested.
In my first fight, I acknowledged it. I'm a professional wrestler, this is who I am, who you know me as. But guess what, I've also been wrestling since I was 5 years old - real wrestling - amateur wrestling, Olympic wrestling.
I was a big fan of amateur wrestling, and I loved it and dedicated my whole life to it for 20-something years, and it's not really a glory-getting sport.
What doesn't allow us to move forward because when we simply - and I've seen it on social media; it really, really upsets me - is to get in our corners and call names and turn our back to each other.
Box office success has never meant anything. I couldn't get a film made if I paid for it myself. So I'm not 'box office' and never have been, and that's never entered into my kind of mind set.
As an amateur, we used to fight people from the same gym. You'd spar with each other and then fight each other in championships.
I don't really make movies because I want to see my face on a billboard or because I want to get good reviews or have a big box office. That doesn't really matter to me at all.
I do believe that Brock Lesnar will be coming back. I don't want to call it from retirement, but he is a huge draw, big guy, sells tickets. So that's a fight I would be interested in.
Ellen [Page] and I had only met a couple of times, but had mutual admiration for each other's work. When I first heard about the film [Into the Forest], I was excited to get a chance to work with one of my peers because it's usually one or the other. You don't get to work with all of the other actors that you're usually competing with.
Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, are motivated by all kinds of issues. They're sincerely interested in the economy, in terrorism, in social issues. But the one overriding thing they're interested in is getting reelected. And if they think that it's harder for them to get reelected by cooperating with each other, then they won't cooperate.
Great presidents take stands, and they fight off these people who really are so far to the right. I don't want to call them names, even though they would call me names.
Everyone thinks that Fight Club is a very important and successful film, but it was a massive box-office failure. Massive. It was a big flop by any commercial-release standard. And it's been a huge hit on DVD. Everything that movie has become has been on DVD. So you can't stake your sense of creative success on this whole box-office-performance matrix, because if you do, you're going to be disappointed most of the time.
I didn't know box office was a thing you could possess but I don't have it. I go up for lovely roles and people with this nebulous thing called box office get them so there isn't much I can do about that unless you know where I can get some box-office myself!
I have no illusions of being the big box office draw. But I would like to have some choices.
I lost an amateur fight where it was supposed to be my last amateur fight before going pro and people were like, 'Oh, you think you're going to make this? You just got knocked out as an amateur?' And I went on to win 13 fights straight and become a world champion, the best in the world.
I think we're really good about pushing each other in practice and we have high tempo and I feel like we have some of the best players in the world so just competing against one another and getting in there and pushing each other around and getting ready for that physical style of game coming up, we have to play hard and pretend it's a game.
A lot of people don't understand my reasoning behind wanting to fight big fights and big names. Knocking off these big names in fights really solidifies me as the best welterweight that's ever done it.