I'm an entertainer. I love to fight.
When I was in New York after I left the Army, I studied for two years at the American Theater Wing, studied acting, which involved dance and fencing and speech classes and history of theater, all that.
Doing the sword fighting is like picking up a dance routine... I think dancing really helps with the picking up of it.
In pro wrestling, if somebody throws a move, it's my job not to get hurt but also to sell the move and make it look like I'm dying.
I started going to acting school in my senior year in high school, and I remained in acting school through four years of college.
Action is pretty boring to do as an actor. Action and sex scenes are silly because it's all faking.
I started doing karate at four, my parents were karatekas. I stopped when I was 17 and went to Julliard and had a lot of stage combat there.
I love doing fight scenes. I've been a dancer since I was 3 years old, so I think that helped me with the movements.
I worked a lot in Chicago's theater scene as a fight choreographer. And so I do have a lot of experience in stage combat and also in Kabuki dance and Kabuki theater.
[In acting] I like the fight scenes because you don't have to remember lines.
I was in a play directed by my father, and I was doing a fight scene, and the choreography went haywire, and I flew backward over a chair and ripped my thumb all the way to my wrist and had to have surgery to sew up all the tendons in there.
I went to LAMDA, which is a drama school in London, and we did a lot of combat there. I was quite good at all that.
The shields were enormous. In 'Julius Caesar,' I died early in the scene and used to fall asleep under the shield until I was woken up by applause.
I couldn't pick up a sword and go fight anyone, let me put it that way. It's choreography and it's acting. The best sword fights you see look amazing, but it's the acting that sells it more than anything.
When I was young, I was trained in stage fighting and rapier and dagger for several years.
I know that people who have been to RADA and LAMDA can smash accents and do Shakespeare: all those things that I never really trained in.
I'm not anymore because I haven't kept up with my certification, but I was a certified actor combatant in rapier, dagger, hand-to-hand, and quarterstaff.
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.
Fencing is a funny sport. Competitive fencing is not really very applicable to the stage world unless you're fighting with a rapier during the Renaissance, you know?
I've been very physical my whole life. I went out hiking and camping for days in the Australian forest, and when I trained at drama school for three years, we did a whole lot on stage-fighting techniques. And I was a dancer from 5 to 18, so I have a memory for choreography.
I always loved stage combat at drama school so I can't wait to get on set and kick some evil monsters into the next dimension!
I got an M.F.A. in acting from NYU, and part of our training is to learn how to use swords in combat situations in a performance and Shakespeare plays where you have to fight.
I did a production of Macbeth in the 1960s in which I had a swordfight in the final scene. But the blade fell off my sword just as I was stabbing the guy. I ended up having to hammer him to death.
When you throw punches at actors, you stop, you pull it, and it looks like you pulled it. When you throw punches at cartoon characters, they are not there, so you can swing through. It looks like you really decked them.
What I love about acting is that you are exposed to so many different things. Horse-riding, sailing, travelling to amazing places.
