Jersey Shore star Snooki was a guest celebrity at WrestleMania 27 and got to compete in a match that she wound up winning.
Former WWE creative team member and actor Freddie Prinze Jr. was against writing for her at the event and he explained why on the latest edition of his Wrestling With Freddie podcast.
Prinze was already told to work on other segments like the one involving Snoop Dogg, but he didn’t want to hear it when asked to do Snooki’s segment: “[WrestleMania] literally defines the WWE in Vince’s mind, maybe it’s in some others. But it is the show. Because it is the show that made the company so he cares and he cares a lot. You can accuse him of caring too much, but you could accuse him of that every single week. Like we all overthink ourselves with the things we’re passionate about all the time, you, me, Vince McMahon. But with this, it’s a different beast, and it makes you crazy. So this is day one, this is Saturday’s production meeting. and we’re rewriting the entire show basically. Vince wants to have Snoop Dogg Snoop come in and we have to write in a segment for Snoop Dogg. Freddie! You’re gonna write the Snoop Dogg segment.’ ‘Alright, what are you looking for man?’ ‘Whatever, just write something. Oh, and you’re gonna write the Morrison segment with Trish and Snooki.’ I go, ‘What?’ He says, ‘You’re doing a Snooki segment,’ and he’s not smiling. I’m like, ‘Yo, man, I’m not doing the Snooki segment. Like that’s not happening, man. You tried to get me to do this against Michelle McCool another time and I told you ‘no,’ I’m not doing that. I got four segments, man. I’m not adding that one if you want me to add that one.’ He goes, ‘Aw, c’mon… Alright, we’ll just get somebody to write it.’ This basically means someone not in the room is gonna have to write it and then direct that segment, but I sure as hell wasn’t gonna do it, man.”
Part of the reason why is that Prinze is against reality shows, and Snooki came from one: “I didn’t like the idea when they first brought it up. I fought against it in the room. Because the Jersey Shore, I think, is the show that she was on. It was big back then. But I’m not a reality TV dude. In fact, I’m like, anti-reality TV, because that takes jobs away from scriptwriters that I know and like a lot. I would rather them be working and then the industry likes reality shows so much because they can make it for one-tenth of the cost of a scripted show. So that gets rid of more scripted shows, which means more of my writer friends are broke. So that’s why I was so against that at the time, right? It was just like, ‘she’s the enemy.’ I’m sure she’s lovely. That was my soapbox that I was standing on.”
