Quote:
Originally Posted by StuartD
It was a very convincing movie. You never for a second thought of them as actors playing a role. They seemed to really be those people... especially Mickey Rourke.
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Most of the wrestlers were actually real independent wrestlers from smaller promotions like Combat Zone Wrestling and Ring of Honor. They guy that played the Sheik character is Ernest Miller, who was a long time wrestler in the old WCW promotion. That definitely helped the authenticity, along with the fact that Mickey Rourke actually received pro wrestling training from Afa The Wild Samoan's wrestling school (old time wrestling fans will remember him).
I loved this movie and it brought back some real memories. My old roommate was a pro wrestler, New Jack from the old ECW, and I used to travel with him a lot on weekends, and in the final year of ECW I worked for them doing promotional work. Most of the guys only worked weekends for ECW, and for extra money they would book themselves on small independent shows in little shit holes all over the US, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and even Japan. It really was amazing to go to an ECW show on a Saturday with a few thousand people, and then some Elk's Lodge or Ramada Inn Ballroom on a Wednesday with maybe 50 people. You could go to a show in some tiny town in Arkansas and every person there would actually still believe wrestling was real...