Acting is a big ambition, but I still have a professional wrestling world to conquer.
I was just lucky to be there ahead of the curve to be the driving force behind bringing this amazing style of wrestling from Japan that combined Lucha Libre, American professional wrestling, Canadian professional wrestling and Japanese wrestling all into one beautiful mix that fans worldwide absolutely can't get enough of.
I am into professional wrestling. Only Greco-Roman and freestyle wrestling can qualify in Olympics. I chose professional wrestling for fame and limelight and good money.
I thought that choosing a non-professional was a condition for me, because it would allow Juliette to have a less-professional way of acting. It would challenge her performance as a professional actress.
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
My take is that acting is acting. A performance is a performance. With performance capture, if you don't get the performance on the day, you can't enhance the performance.
Wrestling is truly my life, and I love being part of the professional wrestling world.
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 told I have to work 10 years to get a doctorate. Well, I have worked all that time to become a doctor in professional wrestling. So to speak, I have a Ph.D. in professional wrestling.
In professional wrestling, I think that they want you to be bigger than life. It's almost like an over-acting type thing - whereas on the big screen, you're 35 feet and they've got a close-up of you to put it on the screen in the movie house. At 35 feet, it's more subtlety than the overboard drama that we do in pro wrestling.
Believe it or not, I kind of went into professional wrestling so I could get an avenue into acting.
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
And so it's sort of a fine line where you want to be recognizable as professional wrestling but you also want to set yourself apart from what some people consider the standard of professional wrestling, which is the WWE.
You grow up and change your look. I feel different from how I did in my Playboy days. Now I think I'm in charge of toning down my look or not.
My mom found a wrestling school that was in Maryland, and she told me to go down there. From there, I really got my head out of any negativity, and I focused on trying to become a professional wrestler, living my dream from when I was a kid. Wrestling saved my life.
WWE is the biggest entity in professional wrestling and if you want to prove yourself to be one of the greatest or one of the best, then that's the only place you can do it.