Steve Austin Reveals Why He Doesn’t Want To Work For WWE Full-Time
Steve Austin was recently interviewed by Lilian Garcia on a Lilian Garcia: Making Their Way to the Ring. You can see submitted highlights below, and the full podcast above.
Not acting anymore:
"All the stuff that I'm doing now is like passion projects like Broken Skull Challenge I love that show and acting I don't really care about acting…no because you just, the memorization process, I mean for me to be you know on set you know and going through the paces, and hitting your marks, and doing another take, doing another take, and then someone else's coverage, I've probably done ten to twelve movies and it was fine while we were doing them. You know being on the set is not fun for me, and don't get me wrong if the right gig came along I would consider doing it I don't mean to sound like a jerk, but people always think just because you came out of wrestling and you did a few movies like oh man you need to do more movies, well it depends on you know, I don't really want to do more movies you know, but people always think this is what you should do. What I should do is what I'm doing."
The Attitude Era talent:
"That was one of the most talented rosters in the history of the business so ya man first of all we had a stacked locker room, and heres the thing, like in the business of pro-wrestling hey man I made it for myself but we're in it as a team because we're traveling together, we're like a carnival, this is pro-wrestling we got a card, you're a match and there's eight other matches or ten other matches whatever the program is, so you're all a team, and you're all fighting to put asses in the seats. It would be real selfish for me to say oh man I want to be number one and I don't want anyone to be close. No, I want to be number one and I want everyone to be kicking and scratching crawling so I can really say that I'm number so you wan the guy you're working with to be as hot as you because the hotter your dance partner is the more people are going to want to see that so we had such a charismatic, talented group of guys in the ring on the horn with their gimmicks Vince was on fire with the ideas, the writing department, the booking department had great ideas so yes I'm glad we had the locker room we had."
Working full-time with WWE:
"I don't like to travel anymore Lilian. It's like when I was still in the WWE and my days before that because I give or take have been in the business thirteen or fourteen years until my neck crapped out and I got out of the business, I loved being on the road back in the day you know you're a road warrior, you're addicted to the road, then all of a sudden you're out there and you've been on the road for ten, fourteen whatever more days and you're thinking God dang man I really want to go home, and then you get home and you're there for about a day and a half you're like man I'm ready to get back on the road, so I mean it's in your blood. But once you get out of the business—and it took me three years to get over getting out of the business, and I won't tell that story because I told that story so many times, but my point is, you know when you're in the business of being on the road with the WWE you're a road warrior and that's what you do, that's your life, and you love it, and I'm very passionate about the business, it's what I wanted to do with my life, it's the only thing I wanted to do. I didn't want to come out here and get into acting, I did it because I had to get out of the business of pro-wrestling but my point is when you turn back into what I call civilian mode, you know, you kind of lose all that interest in traveling."