Professional wresting is like performance art. It truly is. You're taking the crowd on a ride, on an emotional roller coaster.
Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me.
I started under my master, Etienne Decroux, who taught me a new grammar for mime he called statuary mime. This grammar brings style creations. Without it, no art survives.
I love Tim Minchin, Bill Bailey, and Hans Teeuwen, and I'm trying to synthesise elements of theatre into my show a little bit more.
Mime is an art beyond words. It is the art of the essential. And you cannot lie. You have to show the truth.
Just like music, I consider wrestling to be an art form, and I have a vision of what that art should look like.
I worked with a mime coach. I did weapons training. I did weight training.
Wrestling really is kind of the highest form of theater.
WWE is like showbiz boot camp.
Part of the work is determining through what instrument you are playing. Actors are physical, olympian storytellers and we should be able to create entire landscapes with nothing.
Physical expression was my first language: Before I was an actor, I was a dancer, an acrobat, a mime and a street performer.
Going on to train with Lecoq in Paris meant I discovered European theatre at a formative moment growing up.
I am a company in myself. My repertoire has become a bible for all mimes in the world.
As far as I'm concerned all theatre is physical. As Aristotle says, you know, theatre is an act and an action, and he didn't mean just the writing of it, he meant that at the centre of any piece there is an action, a physical action.
I used to do a lot of fencing in the theater and a lot of horse riding in the early days, so I'm used to it in a way. If you're classically trained like I am, it's a little bit like mother's milk to me. I enjoy it.
Dance, theatre, etc. as art, will disappear along with the dominating 'expression' of tragedy and harmony: the movement of life itself will become harmonious.
Professional wrestling... is no different than a Broadway play except that in a Broadway play, actors are using dialogue to tell a story and establish their characters, while in WWE, they're using a physical dialogue to tell their story and build their characters. That's a very unique art; it really is.
A fantasy of mine is to do a podcast that's Marcel Marceau and I, and you only hear me laughing at him and trying to figure out what he's doing.
They say pantomime's a lost art. It's never been a lost art and never will be, because it's too natural to do.
Think about it - pro wrestling as an Olympic sport would be pretty cool. Look at figure skating or gymnastics - what is it? It's a choreographed performance that is judged.
To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake... The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.
I certainly enjoy doing pantomime-y things, but I didn't have any specific training in it.
The greatest acting really is spoken without words, or at least I like to think that.
I went to NYU Tisch for undergrad, and it was amazing. My life then was extremely experimental with acting. I did crazy theater where we would be rolling around on the floor. I would be playing grandmothers, and clowns, and all this crazy stuff. Then I would be doing Shakespeare eight hours a day.
I went to acting school, and I polished my dancing, but I didn't really learn how to fight.
