Hey boys and girls, we had the pleasure of an exclusive chat with World Wrestling Entertainment champion and soon-to-be Hall of Famer, Adam Copeland, better known as Edge. The Rated-R Superstar talked about his new starring role in the buddy comedy, Bending the Rules, his retirement from wrestling and his upcoming documentary in an interview that totally reeks of awesomeness.

Dig it!

 

Bending the Rules

Adam “Edge” Copeland

 

The Lady Miz Diva:  It looked like you were having fun making Bending the Rules?  What was the shoot like?

Adam Copeland: It was interesting.  It was New Orleans in August, so that aspect of it wasn’t all that fun.  There was a lot of sweat on my part and it was all real, so I went through a lot of those horrible shirts through the production of it.  They kinda had to cycle through, ‘This one’s soaked, here, next one.”  But it was a fun process.  It was my first real experience being that in-depth in a movie.  It was a good experience to build off of going forward if it was something I wanted to do more of.

 

LMD:  This is not your first time in front of a movie camera.

AC:  No, it was the first time this involved in the film. I’ve done little things here and there, but nothing where I was one of the major characters in a movie or anything.

 

LMD:  You’re also a recurring character on the Sci-Fi TV series, Haven.

AC:  Yep!

 

LMD:  Between Haven and Bending the Rules, have you considered looking at acting more seriously or taking classes?

AC:  A little, but I also don’t consider myself an actor.  I think if I were to choose it as a full career, then yeah, that would be something that I’d look into, and maybe that possibility, but I don’t think I’d ever do it to that extent where that’s all I’m doing is acting.  I kinda like the idea of being retired, too, with occasional fun stuff that crops up and if it’s fun, yeah, I’ll do it.  Haven is so much fun to do, so that’s we’re going out again to do more episodes this year.

 

LMD:  I spoke with one of your colleagues, Triple H for his feature film, Inside Out.  He believes that acting is something that you could either do or you can’t.  Do you agree with that opinion?

AC:  I dunno, I think a lot of it is just kind of committing to this ridiculous idea that you’re standing in front of a character and playing a character that hopefully people will want to see.  I love going to movies, but I didn’t know if I loved being in one just because I didn’t know if I was any good at it and I don’t know if I am, but it ended up being a fun process.  And because I shot Bending the Rules before I did Haven, I felt going into Haven much more confident than I did with the movie because I hadn’t had that under my belt.  So, going into the Haven experience, it was like, “Okay, I know a little bit about this now.’  And if more stuff popped up maybe I would go, ‘Okay, maybe now it’s time to get an acting class under my belt or get an agent.’

 

LMD:  I understand that you were still maintaining your wrestling schedule while you were filming Bending the Rules.  That sounds grueling.  How did you balance that?

AC:  That was the difficult part, just finding the energy, really.  We would have Monday Night Raw on Mondays, so we would shoot Sunday night until four in the morning, I’d hop straight on a plane up to Boston.  I’d land at eight in the morning, have to be in the building by one to do Raw, get out of there at about midnight, go straight to the jet again, straight to New Orleans, land at four and be on the set at six.  So, my day off -- while everybody else on the set had a day off -- I was doing that and that made it very, very hectic.  I can tell the scenes where I was a total zombie and I can tell when they were Tuesday mornings.

 

LMD:  Bending the Rules has a wonderful cast and I particularly loved the chemistry between you and Jessica Walter.  I think a spinoff for the two of you might be in order.

AC:  {Laughs} Yeah, I enjoyed that too!  It’s interesting because she was the actor that I was most like, “Oooh, gosh, what I am doing here?’  That kinda thing.  She’s a proper actor; she’s acted with Eastwood! It’s like, she’s an actor!  But immediately, she was like, “You are just adorable,” and I was like, ‘Okay, all right, cool, she’s cool with doing this.’ And then throughout doing scenes, it became so much easier just from that initial meeting and knowing that she was going to help me along instead of what she could’ve done.

 

LMD:  As someone who’d been a fan of your professional wrestling career, I always thought you had some of the greatest mic skills.  Was it a natural transition to be in front of the camera?

AC:  There’s similarities, without a doubt, but there’s also some differences and that was one of the things that I had to come to terms with very quickly. With a movie, it picks up every little change of expression, cos it’s right here {Holds hand up three inches from his face}, your shot.  So, I tend to do the eye thing a lot because that translated well for wrestling.  You know, I’d bug the eyes out and pull my hair.  You do that in a movie, you’re gonna look absolutely insane cos it’s just going to be magnified that much more.  I had to get used to that.  I had to get used to pulling that stuff back because if you‘re in a stadium with eighty thousand people you’re trying to translate the physical and you’re trying to translate emotion to a person that’s a town’s worth of people away.  With a movie, you don’t have to worry about that, so pulling that stuff back for me was probably the hardest part, actually.

 

LMD:  Some of readers may or may not be aware that after a glorious career in the WWE, you had to retire due to a neck injury.  What are some of the things you were thinking of doing in your retirement?  I can’t imagine WWE without you.

AC:  I kind of had been starting to wrap my mind around the idea of not doing it that much longer.  I think you have to be a realist and understand when your body is giving you limitations; you have to listen to them.  So, I knew going forward that I was much closer to the end of my career than the beginning, let’s put it that way.  So I was already adjusting to that idea in my head and when I got the diagnosis on the neck, it really just sped up the process up a year.  I’ve had neck issues before; I had a surgery in ‘03, but they fused it and put a plate in.  So I knew at some point this was going to come back and something is gonna have to be done and it might be retiring early.

 

LMD:  On the upside of that sad story, in a few weeks you’re going to be one of the youngest members of the WWE Hall of Fame, inducted beside wrestling legends like Mil Mascaras and The Four Horsemen.  What’s that feel like?

AC:  I think I’m the youngest that they’ve put in, so that feels kinda strange.  And I don’t know if it’s going to fully dawn on me until I’m actually walking out there, like, ‘Okay, it’s over, it’s done, this is the period or the exclamation point on the end of this chapter or this book.  Let’s see what the next one is gonna be all about?’

 

LMD:  What is next for you?  I understand there’s a documentary coming up.

AC:  Yeah, we shot it.  It’s the WWE and we’ve done this before, but it had just been my matches and kind of in character, but this is an actual accounting from the time I was born until I had to retire.  An actual documentary instead of just matches.  It was fun.  We never did it during my career because I was usually the bad guy, but it’s one of those things where our audience starts to see that maybe I have been a bad guy, but I’ve worked pretty hard to get there.  It’s like, ‘Awww, I can’t hate him,’ and I’m one to be hated, so it didn’t make sense while I was still going, but now that I’m retired we can get away with it.

 

LMD:  What do you miss most about being in the ring?

AC:  In the ring, just being able to tell that kind of story and you know it’s working because you can hear that reaction instantly.  So you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m onto something here.  Awesome!’  Beyond that, I don’t miss being sore all the time.  I don’t miss that part of it.  But the locker room and that kind of reaction when you come out and hit your pose or whatever, you feel like Superman.  If you could bottle it, you’d be a billionaire.

 

~ The Lady Miz Diva

March 6^th, 2012