Trish Stratus was recently interviewed by IGN, here are the highlights…
On How Working in Front of Crowds is Different From Masking a Movie: Of course it’s a very different process all together so I had to adapt to that, which is fine. It’s certainly missing the instant gratification from when we wrestle live. I’m used to doing a move and then seeing the reaction to it and obviously on set nobody reacts. [laughs] You just do your thing. So I had to get used to that for sure. And the process is a bit different too. You have to get the script down and working with lines was a little bit different. So it was taking what I knew, which is the wrestling side of things, and adapting it to filmmaking. When I was doing the fight scenes I tried to blend together what I already knew how to do into it. And yeah, it also takes longer. We filmed this back in 2010 and so it’s exciting to do something and be pumped about it, but then it kind of goes away for a while and jumps around film festivals and then comes back. The first time, and last time actually, I saw this live was when we were accepted into a film festival called Actionfest. And that was just after WrestleMania last year. So last April 2011. And I got to see if for the first time on a big screen and it was just a crazy thing to see myself fight like that. I mean, I’ve done this kind of stuff for ten years. I’ve watched myself fight many times. But to see it on the big screen with sound effects is a whole other thing. It was totally awesome.
On Doing Her Own Stunts: Yeah. When the director asked me if I would do my own stunts, I said “Of course” because I wouldn’t have it any other way. And at that point, I came on board in more of a producer role because I was very involved in putting the scenes together and collaborating with the fight coordinator. So before we even began rolling, we spent a couple months together – me and the girl who plays my nemesis in the film, Andrea James Lui – we got together a couple months before and I learned to do a fighting art called Krav Maga. And to me that was an important thing because just like when I worked a program in wrestling you need to have that trust factor and build up chemistry with the person you’re working with. Because that definitely translates physically. The fight coordinator was very protective over everyone’s fight and that’s why the fight’s translates so well. And my character uses Krav Maga and that’s her style but we also knew at the end of the day that we had to throw a little Trish Stratus in there. I mean, we had to, right?
And the opening fight scene we did was almost a bit of an afterthought. And when I saw Scarlett Johansson in Iron Man 2 and she did that tilt-a-whirl hurricanrana, everyone went nuts over it. They said, “Oh my god, I’ve never seen anything like that before.” And I’m like “Hey, world. We’ve been doing that in wrestling for years.” So when I designed the opening fight scene it was a chance for me to take the wrestling world and introduce it to the movie world. So that’s why you get to see a lot of signature Trish Stratus stuff. And you know what, that’s what we do best, right? So why not bring it? So that why there’s a bit of a realism to the fights. I don’t know, maybe I’m just biased, but I think the fights are pretty wicked. And the way Andrea and I approached it was as fighters. Like I know what it feels like to take a punch to the face. She knows what it feels like to take a punch to the face. And we both know how to deliver one. So instead of stunt work, we just did fighting.
On Doing a Film With Steve Austin: Yeah, absolutely. I had just finished filming Bounty Hunters actually so it was a fresh project for me and I told him that I was really excited about it and he told me that it was a great little business to be in. He’s happy to sit there and make a few films a year and he knows the audience that he’s speaking to. So it was good to talk to him. Because you never know if you do your wrestling stuff in a movie whether or not it will be acceptable. Or if the mainstream crowd will like it. But at the end of the day, we know what our fans want and what they like and so I think for me to be a bit Trish Stratus-like in my first film role was a smart move. So he was very supportive and we actually talked about possibly collaborating on a project one of these days.
