The Miz recently appeared as a guest on the “Wrestling With Freddie” podcast for an in-depth interview with former WWE creative team member and actor Freddie Prinze Jr.
During his appearance on the show, “The Most Must-See WWE Superstar” spoke about his decision to want to try for a career in pro wrestling, his time on MTV’s “Real World” and how he prepared for a future in WWE while on the show.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where he touches on these topics with his thoughts.
On deciding he wanted to be a WWE Superstar while on MTV’s “Real World” and looking up wrestling schools on the internet: “I’ve told this story a million times, it’s a true story. I was looking in the mirror and I was like ‘what do you want to do with your life?’ and I’ll never forget, there was like a Rock action figure that my casts mates on the Real World gave me on my show. I looked at that and I said ‘I’m going to be a WWE Superstar.’ I went over to my computer and looked up on Google or Yahoo and looked up independent wrestling schools where I could learn.”
On the wrestling school he picked, how he also went to the Improv Olympics and the Groundlings: “There was Ohio Valley Wrestling, at the time, and there was UPW and UPW was in California, in Los Angeles. I was like ‘alright I’m going to L.A!’ So I moved out to L.A, I paid $2500 just to go to wrestling classes and then I believe every month it was like $400 for acting classes with a guy named Steven Anderson. I got into an acting class with him and I also went to Improv Olympics, as well as Groundlings.”
On using his experiences on MTV’s “Real World” to build his skill set in preparation for a future in WWE: “I tried to find all the tools you could possibly have, like, wrestling is professional wrestling, the art of wrestling. Yes, it’s in a ring, but it is also acting, it is also improv, it is also all these things. By the way, while I was doing The Real World and the challenges, making a name for myself I was making shirts. I saw that merchandise in WWE was a big thing and if I can sell merchandise then maybe WWE would come knocking. It took like three years of that, but not only that, and also to make money I was doing The Challenge, but you didn’t make a lot of money off doing that unless you won. So, I would go to colleges, and colleges would hire me because Real World was so much like being in a college, that colleges would hire me to do motivational speaking, and what does WWE do? You speak in front of large audiences. So I got to practice speaking in front of a large audience all the time, and so I had all these different things.”
Check out the complete interview at iHeart.com. H/T to Wrestling Inc for transcribing the above quotes.
