Former WWE star Wade Barrett, real name Stu Bennett, did an interview with Comic Book Movie to promote his I Am Vengeance: Retaliation film. Here are some of the highlights:
There are a lot of strong female characters in the movie, so, as an executive producer, was it important to you that we see that sort of representation here?
“Of course. It was something of a cultural zeitgeist that we’re in right now that opportunities for demographics in the past who didn’t get opportunities are fortunately coming more to the fore at this point in time. I think it was important for the writers and director Ross Boyask to bring some women into the film in very powerful roles as opposed to the typical damsel in distress role where the tough guy comes and saves the day. He wanted to portray women in more of a Ronda Rousey type perspective where you know these girls can go toe to toe with the guys and you find that out in one of the fight scenes I’m in with one of the ladies in the film. I was nervous about that because of the size difference between the two of us and I didn’t want to hurt her or anything like that, but Katrina Durden really held her own and actually kicked my ass to be honest with you. We have a great fight scene together, and I was very happy at the end of filming when I saw it back and saw what we had done together. She was great to work with.”
You recently marked the tenth anniversary of the Nexus on Twitter, but with so few of the faction’s members still part of WWE, do you look back at you and them as a lost generation of wrestlers who should have been top stars?
“[Laughs] Of course it plays in the head at times that mistakes were made. I personally can’t complain about how things went for me. There’s always things I wished would have played out differently and with some varied minor storyline decisions or presentations, I think I would now be in a very different position to where I ended up in my career. I was very lucky to get to achieve the vast majority of things I wanted to achieve in WWE. I got paid well for it too, and those opportunities and successes that I had during that period have allowed me to transition into a different lifestyle that I have currently where I don’t have to take the first gig offered to me to pay my rent or anything like that. I’m able to pick and choose, and it’s given me a platform where I can get to work with film franchises like I Am Vengeance and get opportunities in that world. I’ve done very well out of my time there and of course there’s always a part of me that has it in my head that if this or that decision had not gone that way, things could have turned out very differently here or there and, in a perfect world, that would have happened. But, I’d be lying if I said I was still sitting at home being bitter about decisions made ten years ago. “
