WWE Hall of Famer Shawn Michaels recently appeared on Jim Ross’ “The Ross Report” podcast. Here are some highlights:
On moving to Florida: We still have our ranch. I guess we sort of now ended up being in two places, but we’ve been in Florida here for the past 4-5 months, and everybody has enjoyed it. We went to the Fair the other day and Disney World on a regular basis; there’s just so much to do here. As you know before, we were in the middle of nowhere, which was great when the kids were younger, but now that they’re older, there’s just so much more opportunity here, a bunch of stuff as a family, and we are very fortunate to still have kids that enjoy being around us. There’s just so much to do here and everyone is having fun and enjoying their time here. One thing I didn’t get, I came back from Kansas a month ago as I went hunting, and then you come back to this warm weather, you kind of look at it like, oh okay, that’s why. You’re wearing shorts every day so you can’t beat it. I wasn’t sure how I was going to transition into it, but I have no problem trading in my jeans and snake boots for a pair of shorts and flip flops, it was actually okay.
On working with WWE NXT: I think everybody knows at this point and have certainly talked about it and been up there for a fair amount of time. I’ve been to the last few NXT tapings and will be going to the one Wednesday night in Florida. I went to the San Antonio Take Over show and it’s something that I am learning about and wanting to get more informed about, and from that point, we will see how it goes. For the most part, it’s something I am going to be doing, it’s just more of a situation where Hunter and I need to sit and sort of decide that I want to go ahead and add a schedule and do a schedule, but as you [Ross] know, I don’t know if I can do that because I have not had a schedule—or a job, since I was 16 for heavens’ sake. I owe it to the company to be able to work on a commitment. The most important thing is consistency. It’s something that you need to be able to be there on a regular basis, but I think that now that we are wrapping up the Hunting show and things of that nature, that I think that very soon here it will be something I can commit to. Earlier I had previous engagements that I certainly wanted to make sure that I finished up, because that is something for all the students and the stars that I owe it to that I can say that I can make a commitment on a regular basis, and at the time that wasn’t something I was able to do until just now recently. Now we can fully talk about getting into a schedule. It is fascinating what they have going on; just the set up is pretty remarkable, and have a lot of us talking about it like Undertaker, Steve [Austin], guys that grew up in the territory days, continually talk about that time and how valuable it was for us, and they’ve certainly done what they can there to encapsulate everything under one big roof, which is pretty tough to do.
On the experience of his first feature film: It was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it; it was my first one so it was certainly in an environment and with a script, I was completely comfortable with. It was a part that I felt that I can easily connect with, so from that standpoint, I said to myself that it was something that I definitely would like to try. I’ve always wanted to try acting. I’ve wanted to do it when I could concentrate and focus on it, and when you see it; I saw it and I can tell my first day from my last day. It’s funny—it’s somewhat similar to when you are wrestling a guy. If you have never met the guy, first time in the ring, you can tell the difference between the first match and the last match where you felt comfortable with the guy and got to know him a little better about his timing and things like that, so that is something that I learned, and really loved the process and certainly as you get more comfortable with the other people and in your role you feel like you get better, and that is something where if I had the opportunity to do it again, I’m really going to try and make sure that I break that ice quickly and get to know the other people and try and get comfortable with them. There are a lot of similarities between acting and wrestling when it comes to getting comfortable with getting people involved. I really enjoyed it, I think it turned out really well. The movie has done pretty well; it’s made its budget back plus more so they’re already making money off of it, so that is a good thing.
