Chris Jericho recently interviewed Entourage star Jerry Ferrara, who plays Turtle in the show, for his Talk is Jericho podcast. Ferrara discussed the experience of guest hosting Raw and more. Below are some highlights.
Ferrara on the production for RAW: When I got there, it was even bigger than I thought. Just the moving parts and talking to a lot of the guys there, it’s basically like a big, giant traveling circus. It’s the biggest traveling circus in the world! And really getting to see just the behind the curtain of that, it just made it that much cooler to me and I respect it even more. … I mean, honestly, it was slow motion. I started getting dizzy. I started getting lightheaded. I’m like, ‘wow! This is live!’ And then Vince [McMahon]’s back there behind the monitor, like, directing shot for shot, like, doesn’t talk to anyone. I really had an out of body experience.”
Ferrara on Kevin Dillon volunteering to take a bump: “At one point, they were like, ‘look, who wants to come in and maybe take a bump?’ I wanted to do it so bad, like everything in my soul was like, ‘I want in’ and Kevin Dillon just answered first. He was like, ‘I’ll do it!’, so halfway through the match, Dillon rolls in and interrupts Cena, but Cena goes at him, Ryder rolls him up, but doesn’t get the pin, obviously, and Dillon rolls out. And that was like the extent of our [involvement].”
Ferrara on getting booed by the fans at RAW and hearing the reaction from the crowd: “When we pretaped the limo shot of us getting out of the limo and we had so much time in between we were watching it in the locker room and you could literally hear, watching the feed, we see us getting out of the limo because, obviously, there’s a little delay, so we hear them booing out there just as on TV and then we hear them booing on TV. It’s like, ‘oh my God! We’re going to get killed out there! We’re going to get destroyed!’”
Ferrara on Ronda Rousey’s role for the Entourage movie originally being written for Rihanna: “[Rousey’s part] might have initially been for someone like Rihanna or something like that, someone where it’s like, ‘are we really going to be able to get Rihanna?’ and obviously the answer was ‘no’. Then you start to get to a point where it’s like, ‘alright, well, if we can’t find anyone we might have to write it out’. And that was kind of my whole storyline in the movie and randomly, thankfully, I have the same agent as Ronda, Brad Slater at WME. And this is now two years ago, so Ronda was obviously well known, but what she [has] done in the last two years, she has gone to the next level. So Brad kept saying, ‘what about Ronda for the cameo?’ and I immediately was like, ‘that’s cool as s–t’. To me, that’s a great move for Turtle, makes him cooler, initially, and obviously I love the physical angle of dating a girl who could absolutely whoop my ass”.
