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Ronda Rousey's WWE Issues With Vince McMahon, Becky Lynch Match, UFC Legacy, Graphic Novel
Ronda Rousey (@RondaRousey) is a professional wrestler and former UFC Bantamweight Champion. She sits down with Chris Van Vliet at West Coast Creative Studio in Hollywood, CA to talk about her graphic novel "Expecting the Unexpected", how Paul Heyman inspired the idea, expecting her second child with husband Travis Brown, whether she still loves professional wrestling, if she would ever return to WWE, her thoughts on Triple H and Stephanie McMahon, why there is no love lost between her and Vince McMahon, fans not liking her previous comments, the controversial finish to WrestleMania 35, if a match against Becky Lynch was ever going to happen, her UFC legacy, the first time she met Dana White and more.
Check out the Kickstarter for Ronda Rousey's graphic novel "Expecting The Unexpected" here: http://kck.st/4c4SQlX
Quote I'm thinking about: "You are not stressed because you are doing too much. You are stressed because you are doing too little of what makes you feel most alive."
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"Well, I'm at the point where I defeated all the big bosses, and I'm going back to the game to complete all the side quests because I'm a completionist. I'm at the point where I just want to go fishing forever. This isn't really part of the whole thing, but I want to get the Hyrule Bass, the really gold one. There was an awesome fish in Zelda that took forever to get. I'm at that point, yeah, I'm going back through the game and going and doing the things that I really enjoy that aren't necessarily, huge achievements and completing the game. I didn't write a graphic novel because I thought it would impress the whole world. I wrote it because it was my way to deal with I think anxiety of that big event or whatever it is coming up. I just kind of have my own social anxiety which I call post social anxiety, right? I'm in the moment, I'm fine, but then afterwards I'm like, oh my God, didn't say this right and didn't do that. I have a tendency to ruminate over things, just in general, I fixate on stuff and I can't get off which is why I can look at a punching bag and hit the same punch for five hours straight trying to get it right without getting distracted. But it's also why I'll wake up in the middle of the night and be like, Oh my God, remember when you tweeted that thing years ago and you're just the worst person ever and there's nothing you could ever do about it? You just think about it. So I found creative writing as a way to take those self-destructive thought loops I couldn't get out of, and purposefully focused my mind onto something creative."
"It came from Paul Heyman. It was right before the go-home for the all-women's main event [at WrestleMania 35]. It was like seven o'clock, and Vince ripped up the whole f*cking show. It wasn't the one where we had the cop cars and everything like that. I think there was maybe one in between, that was the go home, and one before, I don't know, it was really close. We were just waiting around backstage being like what are we even doing? It's seven o'clock. The doors are open. We don't even know what the hell we're doing, which was a common occurrence, unfortunately. And Paul Heyman, we got into a talk about movies and stuff like that. He was like, What kind of movie do you want to star in? And I realized I was just so passively waiting for someone to hand me my dream project. I had such a high opinion of myself and that, like, Oh, I’m a better martial artist than Bruce Lee and a better actor than Jet Li. Why isn't anyone throwing opportunities at my feet? I'm super hot and young, come on. Why isn't this happening? It wasn't happening, and I realized that I was being an idiot, being passive, and I needed to stop being so full of myself and do something about it. So when Paul asked me that question, I was like, Well, what is one role that no one could play better than me? I know I'm not Meryl Streep, I don't have a huge range. Sylvester Stallone gave me a lot of great advice, one of which was an example that no one f*cking wrote Rocky for him. He went and did that, and he told me that there's a difference between actors and stars. Actors can go out there and play anyone, and stars go out there and play themselves, and you need to figure out how to go out there and play yourself. He was like every single role Al Pacino is in, he's Al Pacino the cop, Al Pacino the criminal, he's always Al Pacino. So I was like, I didn't really think about it. I wrote a log line of a wanted assassin with the unwanted pregnancy, has to figure out how to give life instead of taking it, and I left it at that. I didn't think about it. Then WrestleMania came, shattered my knuckle, had to go straight into surgery, went from surgery, didn't even go to bed, straight onto a plane to fly to New York to go on Colbert, because I was voicing Sonya Blade in Mortal Kombat 11 to promote that. Then finally got to be in bed for five hours before getting back on the plane. I'm laying in bed, I'm like, Oh, I have a great idea for when she finds out she's pregnant. I was actually trying to go to sleep, no, no, no, go to sleep. You know when you get an idea in your head while you're going to sleep you keep repeating your head so you remember it in the morning. Then you're just keeping yourself awake and I was like, God damn it, you haven't slept for how long? I was there with my hand propped up like in Rookie of the Year, where the kid is like this, because of the circulation. I'm like, you know what? Just type it. Just get it out, and you'll go to sleep. So I started typing on my thumbs on my phone, and five hours later, it was time for the car to get there. I didn't sleep I was just typing with my thumbs, and then a two-hour car ride to the airport, typing with my thumbs, and by the time we were flying over Arizona or Nevada, was when I hit the end. I had no idea I had a story like that in me to tell, and it was also god-awful and not formatted. I was like, I need help, maybe a writer or someone can help me with this. I hit up my agent, and he was like, in his way he was like, I don't know what you want me to do with 60 pages of block text. Okay, I can learn. I can do this myself. I can figure out how to do it. And that started like an obsession for years, learning about screenwriting and how to structure a script and how to format it, and all these different things. All my free time kind of went into it, and it became my secret hobby, because it's so cliche in LA to say that you're working on your screenplay. I was like, I just didn't want to ever be that guy to tell anybody so I'm working on my screenplay, or can you read my screenplay? So it was my secret shame for a long time."
"That’s exactly what happened. I got it to as far as I could get it and I'm like, no one's gonna take a chance on me being a lead. I've never, proven myself as a lead, and no one's gonna take a chance on me being a writer. Some fighter wrestling check? No, I'm gonna think you can actually write anything. But I started getting much more into graphic novels as I was getting more free time, not training non-stop. And yeah, then it kind of hit me, oh my God, this would be a really cool graphic novel. It kind of came in a roundabout way, which I'm not even gonna go through that story. So a friend of mine started hitting up publishers and Axel Alonso, who used to be the Marvel Editor in Chief, he read it, and he was like, Dude, this is freaking amazing. I can't even believe that you actually wrote it. Let's make it into a graphic novel. Then I continued to pursue screenwriting. I started interning at WME, the story department."
"I love pro wrestling. My experience in my last run wasn't the best, it was the death throes of the Vince McMahon era and they just made it so needlessly stressful. I just wish I could just show up to the venue and already know what the match is and have it memorized."
"I've heard it's a lot better. But yeah, that wasn't my experience before. My experience before was like if you showed up to Saturday Night Live and no one had written the show yet, like you hadn't been filming it and practicing it all week. It was like, you just showed up and you had to negotiate what the script was going to be until the very last second. Even if we killed it and had such a great time while we were out there, it was just the needless anxiety of getting to the finish line just made it so not fun. So unfortunately, it's kind of put a gross kind of a film on the incredible experience. I hear from everybody that's so much better now, and I'm happy for them. But it's also, I got babies, I can't be taking them on the road. I did it for a little bit with one, I can't do that with two. It was hard on, my husband for us not all to be there all the time. I just don't think I can ask them to sacrifice that anymore."
"No, no. I didn't give a sh*t about that. I didn't really give a f*ck what Vince thought, to be honest. I just wanted to have a great match. Sometimes I felt like instead of like enabling us to have a great match, we were fighting against him in order to have a great match. No once it was done and all that, like once I was in there and like in the moment and lost in it, there's no better feeling than when you're in it and you believe the story and you're out there with your friends and you're having a blast. It was like, we had to march through, what were the marshes called in Lord of the Rings? The Dead Marshes. I was just going through the swamps of sadness, just trying to be able to walk into the arena. Then once the music hit, I was like, f*ck you, we're gonna have a great time. Then we come back, and then I come back to the curtain. I'm like, f*ck you. I'm going to my baby. I don't want to hear sh*t unless you actually have a plan for next week, which you don't. You don't have a f*cking plan. I'm trying to get any information all week long, and then no one's gonna tell me sh*t until I get to the arena, and I'm still not gonna hear anything for hours."
On her SummerSlam match against Shayna Baszler:
"I think if we did the match at Bloodsport or something, people would have loved it. But I think the crowd, it wasn't for them at all. It was all MMA easter eggs and all of these moments in MMA history that we’re big geeks for that, we were recreating and throwing homage to in the match and it was not inviting any audience participation or anything like that. But it was kind of like, I don't know if you read my book, but it was a nice little f*ck you on the way out. You're gonna sit here and watch this match that we wanted to do from the very beginning. I don't care what you think, go get some f*cking popcorn. But yeah, we loved it. We had a great time. And from the very, very beginning, I always wanted to be able to wrestle with Shayna and be able to put her over and leave. Which they never would have let us do unless I threatened to leave right at the new year when they told me that I wouldn't be able to fight Becky at WrestleMania, which was what I came back to do. And I was like, Fine, I'm gonna tag with Shayna, and she's in turn on me, and then I'm gonna leave, or I'm gonna f*cking leave right now. That was the only reason we were able to do it, because they wouldn't let us do any Four Horsewoman stuff. They wouldn't let me and Shayna do anything together, because Vince was convinced that no one knew that me and Shayna were actually friends."
"Because Vince is an 80-year-old asshole."
"No, Vince McMahon, John Laurinaitis, Bruce Prichard they can all suck a dick."
"They are fantastic, love them."
"I was talking to her about [kids]. I was just excited about having a baby and we just started trying. Actually, no, we already had two miscarriages, and I was just going to start doing IVF. She took the necklace off of her neck, this necklace and it was a locket with pictures of her girls in it. She was like, this has my babies in it. I want you to put your babies in it. So I never took her babies out. I put my baby on top and I'm gonna have to add some more pictures. I got another locket too that had my boys in it and stuff. But she specifically said babies go in this locket. I love her so much. I miss her actually. I love this for us that we have, frolicked into the sunset and have peaced out or doing our mom thing."
"Full time yeah. I might come back and have some fun here and there. But I can't be leaving home and being on the road like that."
"It is crazy what you can do when you have time to prepare and resources to work with. It's great to see that they do that with people like Logan Paul and Bad Bunny. But I think I made the mistake of I wanted to really learn how to wrestle, be able to do a match on a fly or learn a match within 30 minutes before."
"Triple H, Kurt Angle, Shawn Michaels, helping us out. Michael Hayes, Sara Amato, I mean, everybody that saw it would like, give their two cents in and be like, you give this facial here, you do this, do that. You pulled the hair out from between your fingers, you know. It was the product of a lot of different people and time and practice and precision and things like that. When it got to the day of the event, it was just like, Oh my God I'm so excited, I know exactly this match. And I always wanted to recreate that feeling but it was like, never allowed, ever again. Then it just got to be less and less time and less and less support and less and less help. I really think that they have the ability to be a powerhouse like SNL to create these stars. They just got to put time and production and resources. If they put the machine behind these people, they would be doing so much more than they are now. This is with the minimal of time and preparation and most of the time you see people go out there and they've rehearsed a couple of spots, but they haven't ever done that match before."
"You know what? Let people that want to do it that way, do it that way. But I saw plenty of people come up from NXT that they would doing this match throughout the week, and then they would have their match on the weekend and be able to do it, and they come up to the main roster and they're like, yeah, it's not like that anymore. I think a lot of people would prefer to be able to have some kind of time and preparation. That's when you see a lot of needless injuries happen, is because of little miscommunications or miscues, because these guys talked about doing this in a hallway. They never practiced it before, and that's why people are getting spiked on their heads way more often than they should."
"The second that we cut we all burst out laughing. The second that I cut, laughing our asses off, which I loved blurring that line of what's kayfabe and what's not, what's real, what's not, and what's making what's happening behind the scenes supposedly candidly being part of the show. That was me trying on the sidelines to push a story and put time into it that the company wasn't. So many people are trying to be the cool guy heel. They’re like I want to be the heel, but I want everyone to actually like me for it. I'm like, No, man. I want people to feel like I am an existential threat to what they love and to get them lost into it, have a passionate feeling about it, have people that disagree and think that it's all work, and have it be a big disagreement. Because if everybody agrees about you, the discussion is over. If you make yourself a topic of discussion, you need to be hard to pin down. So, because I didn't feel like I was getting that support from the company to tell that story, I felt like I had to take it into my own hands and blur that line with those videos. It's so funny, because when people can't tell when you're in character and when you're not, I feel like that's where the real art is. When you're really making people participate in a performance, when they don't know where it is. Because I think people want to know, oh, this person's in character, this person this person's not, this person's going as whatever their stage name is, and now they're Fred, where I'm always Ronda Rousey."
"Well, here's the thing, before they had an opinion about me, I didn't give a sh*t about anything they thought about anything. Why should I suddenly care now that they have an opinion about me? The point is I'm here to entertain you. Roddy Piper, his job was to make people feel amazing about him getting beat. I never wanted to be a face. They always would force me to be a face and I was always wanting to be the heel. Because I don't like trying to placate for cheers, I love to get the reaction and the people like it great, I am pretty freaking amazing. But yeah, trying to pander for cheers and stuff like that. It was never for me."
"I didn't think my shoulders were flat on the ground, so I was trying to scoot to get my shoulders flat because it's so f*cking loud I can't hear anything. But that's the difference between a match that got thrown together the night before and the debut match, which is a match that had been put together over weeks with tons of support and practice and opinions and everything like that. Why did we put a whole year into promoting and building this match, and then it's just thrown together at the last second? We were still figuring it out when we were at the venue, and that's what a lack of practice and rehearsal does."
"I wanted to use that. I wanted to use that as, okay, this is how we lead into the next one. We bring it up on the Tron and say, you never got me, this is bullsh*t. The referees are all in your pocket. And put that into the next, you know, the singles between me and Becky that everybody wanted that got taken away."
"No, no, no. I didn't think my shoulders were flush. I was trying to flatten out. But I think that we could have used it and kept it going, but they never let us."
"My family, my friends and my past."
